"Thus wrote the poet William Blake some centuries ago," he explained. Her respect for him waxed further. "But I am lawman for the oxen," he went on. "For poor, wounded Earth. Have you no compassion for us?"

Dagny shook herself. "You're not that dependent— Well, never mind. No, I don't want a showdown, let alone an armed clash. It'd be lunacy." She intended no humor. "I'm just telling you that to avoid it, you'll have to give more than you get. Not more than you can afford, though."

"I fear that to yield would provoke further encroachments. What then of the future?'*

"We can't control it. The grand illusion, that human beings ever could."

He smiled anew, a bit. "Now it is you who quote. Anson Guthrie."

"Why not? Fireball's a vital factor too." She leaned forward. "Listen, please. You want me to use my good offices to make Brandir give in. Well, they aren't worth much for that end, and if they were, I might not employ them. However, I can and will use whatever influence I have with Guthrie.

You've doubtless heard we're close friends. He in his turn will. . . think of something. A stable Luna is in Fireball's interest also. Besides, he wouldn't let a fire burn people up when he could put it out."

Zhao sat bolt upright. "Can he persuade them to obey the law?"

"I think maybe he and I between us^can get them to compromise, if you can get the Federation policy makers to," Dagny replied. "I have in mind some-216

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thing like the Lunarians admitting Sundaram's team. Afterward, maybe they'll agree to stop two or three disapproved projects." She didn't mention that the inspectors might not find everything there was to find and that an undertaking halted could always be started afresh. "You, the Federation, would have to make a credible promise beforehand, of a concession giving them and others like them control of their territory."

Zhao bit his lip. " Their' territory. Private property, de facto if not dejure. No, worse than that. A feudal domain. Those four at the gate were a detachment of what amounts to a private army.

And what of those other Lunarians? Once the precedent is set, what will they seek?"

Dagny resisted a temptation to reach over and pat his hand. "Don't worry so. You'll never get uniformed Lunarian thugs parading around intimidating voters. They're no more interested in politics as we understand it than my cats are. That is, it affects them, they react to it, but it's not a game they really care to play."

"Cats." This time Zhao's smile came easier. "I keep parakeets myself."

Dagny smiled back. "I'd enjoy meeting them."

"You shall be welcome." His mouth lowered. "You, though, have cats."

She decided to push her luck. "Bueno, what about my proposal?"

"That you consult Guthrie? Yes, do. I could not prevent you in any case. Beyond that, we must see.

At best, the details to hammer out will be stubborn and countless."

"Uh-huh. And surprises jumping up at us all along the way. Still, we can hope to build a launch pad for a peace effort, can't we?"

"I must think."

He was a sensible, kindly man, she thought. He would almost certainly come to admit the need for THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 217

yielding ground while preserving forms. Probably he could persuade them on Earth. Of course, he'd retain his deep doubts. She did. What about those long-range consequences?

Unforeseeable. You could only deal with the future as it came at you.

17

In a storeroom underground, Kenmuir saw another door and started for it. "No, not there," Norton said. "That'll take you back to the street. Here." She pushed at a shelf loaded with containers.

It must double as a switch, for a section of wall slid aside. A passage reached beyond, bare, bleakly lit, surfaced with dull-green spray plastic. He followed her in. She touched a second switch and the entrance closed behind them. Air hung chill and stagnant. It smelled dusty.

."Come on," she urged.

Doubt flared into rebellion. He stopped. "What is all this, anyhow?" he demanded.

"It's our way out. If my guess is right, we have to hope they'll assume you went the other way, screened somehow. But if we stay this close, detectors could spot us—motion, infrared, transmitted through the wall—and that*d be that. Let's go."

He shook his head. "I mean, what's this all about?"

She tugged at his arm. The grip was strong. "Kahuhtt, move, you tonto! We may have only minutes."

He resisted. "Not so fast, I say. Who are we running from? What am I being hustled into, and why?"

She released him, clenched her fists at her sides, and drew a shaky breath. The expressionless pale face turned up toward his contrasted uncannily with the intensity of her voice. "Are you afraid this is some-218

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thing criminal? Listen. We're in the service of the lady Li lisa ire, aren't we? Has anyone accused her of any wrongdoing?"

"Well, I—she—"

"You're thinking the Peace Authority wouldn't be investigating her without a reason, aren't you?

Bueno, of course there's a reason. She's told you, hasn't she? She wants to get the Habitat project stopped. Since when has the Covenant of the Federation denied any citizen of any member republic the right to have a political opinion and work for it? Since when was it a crime to search for information? So far, at least, anything unlawful has been on the other side. Most especially if I'm right about what they've done to you, Kenmuir. Find out and then decide!"

"Do you mean—" He rumbled for words. This was like a nightmare from which he could not rouse himself. "A cabal inside the government—"

"I don't know," sjie said starkly. "If we hang around here till they come after us, we never will know. Now, I'm on my way. Come along or stay, whichever, but don't anchor me."

Lilisaire. And action, almost any action was better than standing in helpless bewilderment. It might even be a civic duty to learn more and then, as opportunity offered, report to the proper people . . . whoever those might be. The woman was bounding off at a vigorous jog trot. He overtook and accompanied her.

"Good," she said. "I figured you must be the right sort, or you wouldn't have been picked for this."

Right sort for what?

The passage branched in a T. She took them to the left. A short distance onward, it terminated.

They halted. The air went harsh through his nostrils. He felt sweat trickle rank down his ribs, more than the run warranted. "Wait here," she ordered.

Stubbornness returned. "Why?"

She sighed. "The tunnel is screened. I asked Juan, the waiter, to call and have a screened car sent to this end. I'll go upstairs and meet it. When it arrives, I'll THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 219

come back for you. If you make a dash, maybe you won't be detected. Regardless, with luck we should be gone before they can get here." She opened the exit, slipped through, and closed it on him.

He stood his ground, shivering. Questions whirled. Screens? Against what? "They?" And why chase him and not her?

She'd asked about anything unusual that happened on his journey. When he told her—Hold! He lifted his hands, as if to fend horror off. No, that couldn't be, mustn't be. The woman was delusionary.

What nest of dements had he stumbled into, and why hadn't they gotten themselves cured long ago?

But, but Lilisaire had engaged Norton. Hadn't she? Then Norton— Was Lilisaire above using dements for purposes no sane person would touch? No, he'd not think that, not of her. And Norton seemed competent, maybe ter-rifyingly so....

She returned. A metallic fabric lay across one arm. Did he hear laughter seethe below the urgency of her tone? "It's here already. And it brought this for you. Good old Iscah. Sharp as a shark's tooth. Put it on."

He took the object from her and shook it out. A kind of gown with a coif unfolded, made of fine mesh in which nodules glittered against the dark shimmer. "Portable screening," Norton explained.

"Nothing ought to pick you up now. And we'll go in an ordinary car, which won't register suspicious on any monitor. I scab's got to have called somebody nearby who could dispatch it here pronto. He knows folks everywhere around town." The laughter rattled out, shrill for the contralto voice. He realized what stress she too was under.

He slipped the garment over his head. It hung loose and light, halfway down his shins. Chain mail, he thought: an anachronism no more weird than the rest of this night. Norton led him into an empty basement, up a stair to an empty room lighted only by what trickled through grimy windows. Vacant house, he guessed, reserved for an occasional hideaway or 220

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bolthole—by whom? They went on into the street. The vehicle parked there resembled the cab he had taken, except for being nicked and battered in the body, dingy inside. Opposite gloomed a tenement. Two of its own windows shone, with a cold bluish brightness. Kenmuir wondered who lived there.

Three firefly glints darted to and fro above the roofs. Norton glanced at them. "The pursuit, maybe, scouting for us," she said. "We're none too soon."

Would they scan Kenmuir's outfit and drop down to check? He made haste to enter. Norton was right behind. "Ready," she to!d the car, and it started off. He twisted his neck to look backward. The fireflies stayed aloft. At short notice, over unfamiliar territory, no matter how well equipped, a squad couldn't instantly identify everything. It wasn't as if the resources of the whole cybercosm were marshalled. Relief billowed through him.

Should it? he wondered. Were he seen and seized, would it actually be a rescue?

He slumped back, willing his pulse to slow down, counting again his reasons for doing what he did.

Norton sat equally still beside him. Lights that they passed flickered across her pseudo-face, then left it once more in an uneasy dusk.

With an effort, he asked at last, "Where are we bound?"

"To Iscah's laboratory, I suppose," she answered in the same monotone. She addressed the car: "Is that right?"

"I do not have that information, nor may I speak the address," it responded.

She shrugged, turned toward Kenmuir, and said, "AH I could tell Juan was to call Iscah and tell him this felt like 'an emergency, that I had a party with me who might be radiating, and that we'd go to the place on Pico in hopes he could send a screened carrier." Her head drooped. "If we'd waited there till morning and nothing came, I don't know what Fd have done." The THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 221

head lifted, the words regained a little color. "I'd have thought of something."

"Concealed doorways, screened tunnel, screened transport," he said slowly. "You're quite familiar with this, this underground, aren't you?"

"Not really." She regarded him a while before continuing. "I'm not in any illicit operation. Nor am I involved in a revolutionary movement or any such pupule—such nonsense. Nobody I know is. It's just that I work with metamorphs. Not here, mostly, but the work brings me here from time to time, and it's caused me to meet some of these people."

She paused. When she went on, her voice had more emotion in it. "The metamorphs of Earth ...

they've got a hard fate, you know; Prejudice, discrimination, and there's very little the state can do to help them because in fact they don't fit in. They can't. Think how the Lunarians, the lucky ones, don't."

Again she fell silent. He waited. A spacefarer grew good at waiting.

"They form their organizations, their societies— cultures, even, or the germs of cultures," she resumed presently. "Yes, part of what goes on is illegal, but any victims are usually other metamorphs, and often there are no victims, it's a matter of helping each other toward a life that suits the species better. Most of the different leaders are trying to work out a ... commonalty, a way for all metamorphs to cooperate, openly and lawfully. It isn't easy, it's not progressed far, in the long run it may be impossible, but we have to try, don't we? That's what I've been involved in, on behalf of my people." He wondered if she was a changeling herself, beneath the mask. What breed? If not, how closely did she identify with one of those races, and which? "It's led me into odd byways, yes, Fve been initiated into certain secrets, because I needed the information so I could go home and suggest to my people the best courses for them to steer. Don't ask me too much."

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"I have to ask a few things," he rasped. "You, they, were very quick, very well prepared to react against . .. official actions. That doesn't sound like legality to me."

"I admitted some activities are covert," she replied. "We, the leaders I've dealt with, we hope to phase those out, but meanwhile we've got to collaborate with the—you can call them gang lords if you insist, but the fact is that their ordinary, decent followers trust them." After another stillness: "The gang wars have practically ended. And the outright persecutions and the mob attacks by straight-gene humans. But metamorph history remembers, and tells metamorphs to stay prepared."

Also, he thought, the maintenance of protections and of a communal structure was a strong moral factor by itself, giving cohesion, hope, meaning to life. Fireball—

Norton sank back. "For favor, I'm wrung dry," she whispered. "Can we just rest a while?"

Compassion touched him. "Surely." His own bones seemed to go liquid.

The car drove on, kilometer after kilometer, mostly through darkness and ruin. After a while Kenmuir made himself stop looking at the time.

Norton sat leaned into her corner, eyes closed, maybe asleep. She had drawn the poncho close about her, revealing a shapely frame. Remarkable person, formidable, but he had an illogical sense of an inward vulnerability. Why was she engaged in this unhopeful cause? For the sake of her creatures, whichever they were? Hardly that alone. What had Lilisaire promised her?

What had Lilisaire really promised him?

—The stop jolted him from his inner darkness, back to the outer. Norton sat up. "I guess we've arrived," she said. Eagerness throbbed in the words. As the vehicle opened, she scrambled lithely out, all her energy regained. Young, Kenmuir decided. He himself felt stiff and chilled. Fifty-five wasn't old, not

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nowadays, but probably the years wore away the spirit as much as ever in the past. He followed her.

Sky-glow above walls told of a settlement not far off. No doubt the building before him tapped its utilities. Windows steel-shuttered, the brick facade appeared in good condition, as nearly as he could tell through the gloom, but its neighbors crumbled empty and one was a rubble heap. Iscah wanted isolation, did he?

Norton moved toward the door with a sudden hesitancy not due to the poor seeing. "I've never been here," she admitted. "I just met him once, at a ... an organizational conference, and heard a little about what he does. Assorted technical jobs." For people who perhaps couldn't afford a regular service, or perhaps did not wish the work known, Kenmuir thought. "Carfax—Lilisaire's agent who briefed me mentioned him too, among possible contacts."

Yes, Kenmuir thought, the Wardress had more operatives on Earth than Norton, some of them likely more active than she. He had a strong impression that she was carrying out her first mission for the Lunarian, because she happened to be the best qualified for these special circumstances. Or because she was the most powerfully motivated? .. . The others, though, at least gathered what information they could, information of every sort that might conceivably someday prove useful.

Much of it would concern the Hetero-sphere, where unregistered facilities and unconforming lives were many... .

The door swung back on hinges. Light spilled around the hulk of a female Titan. She gestured them to come inside, and closed the door behind them.

The entry room seemed too small for her. But if you allowed for the stockiness demanded by the mass, she was a handsome woman, evidently of Near Eastern descent, neatly clad in blouse and trews. A knife at her hip, with knuckleduster haft, was the single disagreeable feature. When she spoke, the bass sounded educated and quite feminine: "Bienvenida, Senorita Tarn and senor. I hope everything went well?"

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Tarn? Kenmuir shot a glance at Norton. Yes, she'd have given her right name to the waiter, else he'd never have cooperated. "As far as I can tell, we got clean away," she answered.

"Muy bien. Would you like to shed that coat, senor? The house is thoroughly screened and shielded." The Titan helped Kenmuir take the garment off while she added: "I am Soraya, For favor, follow me." She laid the mesh across a chair and started down the hall, so soft-footed that the dry old floorboards made hardly a sound. He did feel them tremble.

At the end of the house, a modern door contracted. The chamber beyond also belonged to the present era, cluttered though it was. Several rooms must have been demolished to make this large a space.

The ceiling shone white on shelves, cabinets, benches, consoles, apparatus of physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, computation, and things Kenmuir did not recognize. Despite ventilator grilles, the air kept a faint acridity, smells of what happened here. Something in the background ticked.

A man got up from a computer terminal. He was a Chemo, totally hairless, skin obsidian-black. The lean body, long skull and visage, pale eyes were nordic. He wore little more than a gray smock over a shirt and hose, but somehow he made it imperial. Yet he spoke quietly, in a rather high-pitched voice: "Buenas tardes, senorita and seflor. Will you be seated?" He waved at tall stools.

Clearly he did not mean to shake hands, bow, or otherwise salute. "Would you care for coffee?"

"Gracias, no," Norton said. "I'm too charged." She turned to Kenmuir. "You?"

"Nor I," he replied, truthfully enough. Something wet would have been rather welcome, as dry as his mouth had gone, but he didn't want to delay matters and wondered, besides, whether he could get anything past his gullet. The weariness in him had become a pulsing tension. Like Norton, he perched himself. Soraya loomed at their backs.

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\l am Iscah." Facing them, the man folded his arms, leaned against a lab bench, and talked methodically. "I take it that you, senorita, are Alice Tarn, known too as Aleka Kame. It is prudent to make sure. Would you remove your mask? Soraya will assist you."

Norton—no, Tarn?—hesitated for an instant, then jerked a nod. "Might as well, I suppose." She accompanied the Titan on a labyrinthine course to a medical couch and counter.

"It is equally wise from your standpoint," Iscah remarked as she passed by. "If the pursuit inquires among patrons at the Asilo, it will obtain a description of you in your disguise. I assume it will find no reason to associate that with your real persona—" he grinned "—insofar as

'real' has meaning in this context."

"Oh, I'm Aleka, all right," she flung back over her shoulder. "Anyhow, I was the last time I looked." The forlorn attempt at a jest appealed to Kenmuir.

Iscah focused on him. How shall I address you, seflor?" he asked.

The spaceman considered. What the Q, he wasn't a character in a historical thriller on the multi, required to act mysterious. He snapped forth his name and profession. "And I'd like to know what this rigmarole is about," he added. The roughness surprised him. Not his normal style.

Iscah stayed cool. "We share that desire. Let us try to learn. What can you tell me of the situation, Captain?"

Kenmuir swallowed. What should he tell, in this den of grotesquerie?

"Go ahead," called the woman who tagged herself Aleka. "It's nothing to be ashamed of." After a moment: "And you won't proceed blindfold, will you, Iscah? Besides, I suspect having the facts spread around will upset those bastards."

In for a penny, in for a pound, thought Kenmuir, harking back to centuried texts that had beguiled 226

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daycycles in space. But—He smiled ruefully. "I'm afraid I have very little in that line," he said.

Indeed, a few sentences delivered his tale. "In spite of Lilisaire's animus against the Federation, I had no idea its police were aware of me till Mamselle Nor—Tarn hauled me off."

"'Animus,'" I scab murmured. "I can like a man who uses words of that kind."

"I've no wish to become an outlaw, either," Kenmuir stated. "If the government is trying to stop this business, it must have a reason."

"Necessarily a good reason?" rumbled Soraya. She took instruments from a case.

"Let us first collect what further data we may," Iscah said. He walked off. "Over here, por favor."

Electronic equipment was ranked along one wall. Kenmuir knew the object Iscah first picked up, a magnetic field mapper. He couldn't see what it read as it was moved across his torso, and Iscah's midnight countenance had turned expressionless. Across the room, Soraya worked with a delicacy incredible for those gigantic hands, teasing the life mask skin free of Aleka's. You could do the job alone, and! no doubt Aleka had donned it thus, but removal without help took a long time if you weren't to hurt the delicate organism.

Peculiar partnership, Kenmuir thought. Titan, gene-bred for strength and endurance, infantry to go where war machines could not; Chemo, hardy against radiation and pollution that would sicken or kill ordinary humans; both stemming from a few ancestors engineered to deal with things as long vanished as the governments and the fanaticisms that had ordered it. Beings obsolete, purposeless, except for what they could make of their lives by themselves. He could only guess at that.

Plainly, Soraya was more than a bodyguard. Was Iscah more than a technician? Might they even be lovers? The idea seemed freakish at first, then touching, then tragic.

Various instruments had been busy about his per-

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son. Iscah laid the last of them down, stepped back, and nodded. "You were right, Seflorita Tarn,"

he said, still imperturbable. "He carries a spy."

The notion had barely skimmed over Kenmuir's mind. The utterance hit him like a fist. He snatched after breath. "No, impossible!" he cried. "How could anybody-—no way—"

The ice-colored glance laid hold of his. "Let me explain," Iscah said. "The technique is not publicized, but a part of my business is to know such things. A conjoined set of molecular assemblers was slipped into you. You may think of it as a pseudo-virus. Obviously, the servitor in the lounge put it in the drink it gave you. A single drop of liquid would be ample to hold the nanomass involved. I would guess that the dropper was in a substituted finger. Did you later feel a trifle ill and fevered for a short while? ... I thought so. The pseudo-virus was taking material from your bloodstream to multiply itself. When there were sufficient assemblers, they set to work, again using elements in your body, carbon, iron, calcium— I won't bore you with the list. The process was harmless per se, because the device they built masses less than a gram, neatly woven into your peritoneum near the diaphragm, and taps less than a microwatt from the metabolism of surrounding cells. Essentially, it is a circuit controlled by a simple computer with a hardwired program, although it does include a transponder for sonic-range vibrations."

"I didn't have those details," Aleka said. Her voice came muffled through the skin being pulled over her head. "I'd just seen reports of tracers planted in people or animals for study purposes, and Lilisaire's agent warned me it can be done clandestinely."

Yes, passed through Kenmuir. Lilisaire would think of that possibility. It was a trick she'd gladly play herself. "The, the thing can't radiate . . . enough for pickup at a distance . . .

across background noise," he protested.

"No, no," Iscah replied. "What it does is to detect 228

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an ordinary transmission line nearby—which means almost anywhere on Earth, you know—and tap in with a microsignal, an imposed modulation. Special equipment is necessary to recover, amplify, and interpret that weak an effect; but the cybercosm does not lack for special equipment. Hence it tracks your movements—through the air, too, since every vehicle must always be in contact with Traffic Control. And it conveys your speech. To listen in on what you hear, it has run a line up to the auditory canal—a submicro-scopic thread, I assure you. Interruptions of the surveillance will be accidental and transitory, unless deliberately arranged as we have done for you."

Rage exploded in Kenmuir. Suddenly he believed he understood what it meant to be raped. Not that he'd said or done anything intimate these past days. Nevertheless!

Vaguely, he heard Iscah muse aloud: "I wonder whether the spy was able to eavesdrop on you inside Guthrie House. I have heard that that place is well screened, and you mentioned being lent a secure line when you called for further instructions. Presumably the number you called activated a shuntaround program as well. Still, I suggest you bear in mind the possibility that that agent of Lilisaire's is now compromised."

"It's a, a violation of my Covenant rights," Kenmuir choked. "I never consented. I'm going straight to the nearest ombud and—" He strangled on his words.

"And what?" asked Iscah sardonically. "Do you expect the miscreants will be found and punished?

They are agents of the government, remember."

"Why? Why?"

"The secret's got to be that important," Aleka said. "Which means Lilisaire is right about the size of it."

Unmasked, she came over to the men. Kenmuir stared. She had doffed her poncho too, revealing a body hard-muscled beneath spectacular curves, clad in plain tunic and slacks. The features were nearly as

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arresting. It was as if every bloodline on Earth had flowed together, harmoniously and vibrantly.

Anyone who paid for biosculp could have any face desired, of course, but he felt sure hers was natural. Only nature had the originality to create all the little irregularities and uniquenesses that brought it so alive.

"What are you going to do to get justice?" she challenged him.

Energy drained away. His shoulders stooped. "What can I do?" he mumbled. "I'm marked. A medic will have to dissect this thing out of me."

"That would take at least a day, probably more, in a clinic where they have healing enhancements,"

Iscah said. "I don't, and to go there would defeat the purpose. Fortunately, I can set up a resonator that will burn out the circuit by overloading it. No significant damage to you, as low as the power levels are. Any discomfort will be slight and brief. Later, when it is convenient, you can have your surgery. I do not think I would take the trouble. The remnants will be inert and unnoticeable."

Heartened, Kenmuir drew himself erect. "What then?"

"We'll talk about that," Aleka said. "You two will help us, won't you?"

Soraya rejoined them. "We certainly will," sounded above their heads like summer thunder.

"Why?" Kenmuir floundered.

Iscah gave a parched chuckle. "In due course I shall present the lady Lilisaire with a substantial bill."

"No, I mean—the risk—"

"We live with'risk all our lives, here," Soraya said quietly. "I have a feeling this is a gamble more worth taking than most."

"Is it?" Kenmuir wondered. "What can you, your people, gain?"

"Maybe nothing. Maybe much. We'll see."

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afresh. "You can't have any notion of... overthrowing the Federation. You aren't dement. And I, I wouldn't go along. There may after all be a, an excellent reason to keep the secret."

"In that case," Aleka said, "they could have told you so like honest po'e. Plenty of information's not allowed loose, but everybody knows why. How to scramble a driver robot to make the vehicle crash onto a target, for instance. But no, they broke in on you, your perfectly legitimate inquiries, before you'd even begun them." She was still for a moment. The hidden ticking seemed louder than before. "I don't want anarchy either," she finished low. "But I believe we've run afoul of a criminal conspiracy."

"And we alone will oppose it?" he jeered.

.She stepped close and caught both his hands. Hers were warm and firm; he felt small calluses.

"Listen, I beg you. Maybe, somewhere along the line, we should go to the proper authorities. But who are they? What can we prove? That you were bugged ... by someone who can't be traced. Someone well positioned to strike at us, though, and afterward bury the story in a subduction zone. We need more information before we surface. I think I know where and how to search for it. Come along with me that far, Kenmuir. You're a man, a free man. Come!"

Freedom, Lilisaire, and a regathering sense of outrage to avenge. If they had done this to him, what might they do to others? He cast his mind back across history, terror that could have been crushed when it was newly hatched but instead was let grow and grow. What had Burke said? "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Something like that.

Was this actually evil that he had met? How could he tell, save by hunting the truth down? If he could. Aleka believed it was possible, and she was better informed than he was, and—

"Very well," he heard himself say, and saw joy blaze THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 231

up before him. "For a while, reserving my right to opt out when I choose."

—and, laughed a devil in his head, he was most infernally curious about this secret that went back to the dawn of Lilisaire's world.

18

The Mother of the Moon

Liars Rydberg had soon come to feel that when he visited his mother and stepfather he was at home, more than ever elsewhere, even with the old couple who gave him his upbringing and all their love.

The Beynacs were spacefolk, Fireball folk. His missions that sundered him from them, so that they rarely and briefly met in the flesh, also bound him to them.

On this occasion the big viewscreen in their living room played a record from the Stockholm Archipelago. Sailing was his great pleasure on Earth. Waves danced and glittered among the islets; wind tossed the crowns of trees, sent clouds scudding across blue and boats heeling and dancing before it. Sound went soft, rush and whistle. The air cycle had been set for a tang of salt and sunlight to join the perfumes of Dagny's flowers. She wanted to gladden him. Today everybody needed that.

It had gone much as she hoped, from the moment she bade him welcome. True, his smiles came seldom, but he always was a solemn, undemonstrative sort. Now they sat with drinks, hearing him tell of his latest faring. Altogether the company numbered four. Jinann, her youngest, still lived here.

"—nothing special on the way out," he said. "The common long, lazy haul."

"But it was urgent, you told us," Jinann interrupted. "Why ran you not at one g the whole way?"

She was less educated about such matters than most

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Moondwellers. Her interests were art, notably the jewelry work from which she was beginning to earn pretty well; and men, a series of stormy affairs; and, paradoxically, a search for truth and meaning. Withal, she was closest to her parents of that whole brood and most nearly Terrestrial in appearance—at twenty-four, not unlike the young Dagny Ebbesen.

Rydberg's look at her was discreet but unmistakably enjoyable. "With such a mass, the fuel cost would have been ridiculous for the time saved," he explained.

Dagny reminded herself that usage had changed of late. "Fuel" didn't mean simply antimatter, but also the reaction material it torched forth. Although superb capabilities were coming on line, she must remember, too, that it was taking a while, that the capital investment in older vessels couldn't just be spouted away—She was thinking in Guthrie's words. Pain stabbed.

She pulled her attention back to Rydberg: "—and we had constant full weight once we'd spun up the hull."

Jinann's eyes widened. As she sat straighter, her hair passed like a flame over the sight of clouds and water. "Eyach, a spider ship? Sheer beauty, they. I've sought to make a brooch in the form of one, a minimotor to turn it,^nit there lacked a universe around."

"Would you like to see ours?" Rydberg asked. Beneath his reserve, Dagny thought, he had more feel for people than he let on, or maybe than he knew. "If I'm going to show you my pictures, we can start there. It's a standard scan, you've seen the same kind a hundred times. But it is ...

cheerful."

"We could use some cheer, by damn," Edmond Beynac growled. He reached to close his hand around Dagny's.

"Hush," she murmured aside. Not to break the fragile mood in the room. Nonetheless his concern THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 233

lifted her heart. He felt the loss himself—who didn't? —but he knew how deep it went in her.

Rydberg kept his tone dry: "A large spacecraft routinely sends a bug to observe from outside, supplementing her instruments and sensors, making sure everything is in order."

Space did not forgive, Dagny thought. Memories trooped down the years, her dead and they who had come near dying.

Rydberg took a pocket databanker from his tunic and activated the multiceiver screen. Before them appeared what a tiny robot had recorded as it jetted about. Distance-dwindled, the hull was a teardrop amidst blackness and frost-cold stars; the four fullerene cables, each extending a kilometer from its waist, were gossamer, the pods at their ends were glints. They turned like second hands on an antique clock, measuring off time while they fell between the planets.

"Wondrous," Jinann breathed.

Rydberg grinned a bit. "Less wondrous to live in." He played a close view, synchronously rotating.

A man climbed downward, radially outward, by rungs in the flexible airtube that lay alongside the cable. The camera followed him to its pod, which he entered. Another scene succeeded this, taken within the cramped and crowded quarters. "Here I am." Limited facilities for hobbies existed.

Rydberg in image sat at a workbench, using a variety of tools to hand-carve a length of wood. The shot focused on his design, intricately intertwining vines and leaves. "This will be a frieze for an armoire I will make on Earth."

"Ah, for your home there?" Beynac asked.

"For the home I hope to have there." Rydberg sighed. "I'm tired of apartments."

Yes, Dagny thought, he hadn't many years to go in space. If you started young in that game, you ended it half young. Never mind longevity meds, nor even the robotics that made human slowness and frailty almost

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irrelevant. Beyond a certain point, no biotechnology would compensate for cumulative radiation damage. Someday an electromagnetic screen would be perfected, to fend off cosmic rays and solar wind, but meanwhile they set their limits on careers. Fifty was the usual cutoff age, to assure a normal, healthy span afterward. Already, his silvering hair—

It meant less that 'Mond's was wholly grizzled, while hers stayed red because she made it, not so much in vanity as in defiance. They had spent most of their lives inside the Moon, far better protected.

Her heed went back to the scene. Whoever had been shooting it, doubtless by request, drew back for a longer view. An attractive woman came up behind Rydberg, leaned over to watch what he did, laid a hand on his shoulder. "Una, that is Leota Mannion from North America, one of the engineers we were conveying," he said a little quickly.

Dagny brightened. "Friendly sort," she observed.

Rydberg shifted his glance. "Well, on a lengthy mission—"

A prospective wife for him? He really should start having children soon. Especially being a spaceman. Dagny wasn't convinced that nanorepair could entirely fix mutated DNA. Not that she and

'Mond hadn't been getting grandchildren and didn't expect more— from Brandir and his two wives, Verdea and the Zarenn (once Jiang Xi) she'd wedded in an eerie ceremony, Kaino in his communal arrangement (though there you needed genetic analysis to be certain who'd fathered whom, and the members didn't seem to care), Temerir and his colleague Hylia (once Olga Vuolainen), maybe Fia and Jinann in future..,. But Lars was the Earth human.

It'd be nice if he took a North American wife. Of course, more and more people in that country felt the constitutional republic wasn't coping with its problems. But you could move abroad if you had to. While Lars wasn't exactly young any more, neither was he THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 235

too old to start afresh. Plenty of life ahead of him yet, an estimated seventy-five years if he followed his med program and didn't come to grief....

Oh, if only Uncans had been born enough later for the treatments to take full hold and give*tiim that much!

But then everything would have been different, Dagny would never have known him, in fact never have existed—

She blinked away tears and heard Jinann: "Do you truly thus and altogether shut yourselves away as you fare? Gives a journey no scope for samadhi?"

Youthful earnestness, Dagny thought. A slight, comforting smile touched her lips. Jinann had been a Buddhist, afterward a Cosmicist; now she wandered and mused on her own beneath the stars of Luna. Would she someday become a prophetess to her kind? , "We get a sufficiency of the universe on the job," Rydberg said. "Here is the far terminus of our voyage, out beyond the orbit of Saturn."

The camera had scanned a small comet. At first it was unimpressive, well-nigh ugly, a dark, rough lump against the galaxy's glory. When the edited sequence swept close, you realized with your senses as well as your mind that "small" meant something else in these depths, multiple billions of tonnes of rocks, frozen gases, and ice, ice. The view passed breathtakingly over a pitted surface to the clustered human works. What the robots had built for the engineers was not dwarfish either. Those buildings, machines, and tall frames would have stood out in any landscape.

The view steadied. Rydberg activated a pointer image to show where girders were buckled or skewed.

"You see how the foundation gave way below the mass driver," he said: damage exceeding the repair capacity of the system or its machine attendants. "Probably you remember from newscasts that it was caused|by a major quake, which the continued stress of reaction triggered."

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Beynac snorted. "I told those bloody fools at the start, they should study the interior of the comet more thoroughly before they began. Tetes de merde!"

"Well, it was a judgment call, as Leota Mannion would say," Rydberg replied, mainly for Jinnan's benefit. "At its original distance, with few torchcraft then available, more investigation would have taken years of expensive time. Meanwhile its position would be getting less and less favorable, until the window of opportunity closed. The decision was to proceed on the basis of what appeared to be reasonably good knowledge, and get started nudging it sunward."

"I know, I know," Beynac grumbled. "If they had sent me and a few of my students out, we could have warned them."

How he would have reveled in that, Dagny thought. He'd solved too many of the Moon's riddles. He had scant taste for filling in details; more and more his field trips reminded her of a wildcat pacing its cage.

"Actually, as you also know, fail-safes were built in, and this mishap was not catastrophic,"

Rydberg said needlessly. "We got it fixed in time." We. Dagny was impatient to see the record of her son and his crew aiding the team. "It's bound back again for its new orbit," he finished.

"For its transfiguration," Jinann murmured.

Rydberg raised his brows. "Do you disapprove? Some people do," holding that comets should be left inviolate, to salute the sun with a flare of beauty. But this one would never have done that, Dagny thought. Never in eon after eon while it swung through the Kuiper Belt, out beyond Neptune and Pluto where Sol was merely the brightest among the stars.

Jinann shook her head. "Eyach, nay. I said 'transfiguration.'"

Into life. The thrill went through Dagny anew. Ice mined and brought to Luna, water, a harvest more abundant than any from the asteroids, the beginning of a lavishness that would at last bestow rivers, lakes,

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maybe an interior sea, upon habitation; and living things are mostly water.

She bore no pride more high than knowing she had been in the forefront of the battle for this, the call, the politics, the bargains and connivances, setbacks and despair and toilsome return, until the World Federation agreed that a wholly alive new world was worth paying for.

Not that she claimed too-much honor. Without Fireball at their side, the Moondwellers would have been a handful of flies, to be brushed aside when they buzzed.

Her man spoke it for her, quietly: "We have Anson Guthrie to thank."

"Yes," she whispered.

Jinann's regard of the older three grew troubled. "What think you will happen now he is gone?" she asked. Lunarian soul or no, to her it must feel as if a great tree had fallen, leaving an emptiness in the sky.

It did not quite to Dagny. Maybe it would later. First she had her Uncans to mourn.

"Fireball will go on, have no fears," Rydberg assured. "We are lucky he didn't die before he agreed to be downloaded, but even without that, Fireball would keep his strength, his dream."

"Dreams can die," Jinann said, "and then the strength dies."

What was Guthrie's download, his ghost, like? Dagny dreaded the hour when she must meet it.

"We will see that they don't," Rydberg vowed. He turned toward Beynac and spoke with a briskness that Dagny knew guarded him against unleashing whatever grief was in him. "'Mond, earlier I promised you some interesting news."

The geologist was likewise glad to change the subject. "Yes?"

"While the repair work went on, naturally we mounted an intensive sky survey. The comet's new path would be different enough from what was origi-238

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nally planned that we must make sure there would be no serious meteoroid impact. When the computer analyzed the observations, it reported no such danger. However, I had idle time, and I remembered your ideas about asteroidal debris in far space. I programmed a search for indications that would otherwise have been ignored."

Beynac leaned forward. "Yes? What did you find?"

"Nothing picturesque. The reflection spectrum, barely readable, as faint as it was, of an object that standard theory does not believe ought to have the orbit this one does. Excuse me, please, while I interrupt the show," said Rydberg to the others. He keyed his databanker. The image from the comet gave way to a band of dim lines, numbers below them indicating wavelengths, and more numbers in columns. At the bottom stood a listing of that which calculation had distilled from the raw data.

Beynac peered, started half out of his chair, sank back, and mumbled, "Mon Dieu. Enfin, enfin."

After a moment, into the air: "But it had to be. If I was right, this must be. It was only that no one looked as hard as they should. Too much else to search after."

A song for him erupted in Dagny. She seized his hand.

"What means this?" Jinann inquired.

"It is a nickel-iron asteroid, at present about thirty astronomical units from the sun," Rydberg told her. "We don't yet have the figures to compute" a very accurate orbit, although I ran a probecraft to high velocity and got a parallax. Roughly, perihelion is at about five a.u., aphelion forty or fifty thousand— ultra-cometary. The inclination to the ecliptic is forty-three degrees."

The young woman was not ignorant of basic astronomy, no Moondweller was, and she had sometimes heard her father talk about his heresy. "There should be no such thing, should there?" she said.

"No, no, rien la-bas—nothing yonder but ice dwarfs," Beynac answered, almost automatically, as if THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 239

he spoke in sleep OF a daze. "According to the standard picture. I agree they are nonsense, notions of colonizing the comets. Too far apart, too Jittle mineral buried too deep in ices. But this—" His voice trailed away. He stared before him and breathed heavily.

"It could not have originated that far out, especially in an orbit so skewed," Rydberg said to Jinann. He spoke awkwardly, unsure what she might already know, wishing neither to insult her nor exclude her. She gave him an amiable attention. Peripherally, Dagny admired how she could put on Earth-human femininity whenever she wanted to. "Your father's idea, I suppose you are aware, his idea from studying the distribution of asteroid types in the inner System —he thinks there was at least one more than the accepted ten original bodies between Mars and Jupiter, which collisions reduced to those we know." He gulped. "I thought the object we found might provide evidence."

Beynac's head swung toward them. How well Dagny knew him in that mood, his intellect aprowl after quarry to pounce upon. "I suspect those eleven began as three," he boomed. "From this body perhaps we may find out. But it is not the major one that was lost. It is too small. And such an orbit is unstable. In a few million years, the planets will change it radically. My large, dense asteroid, it was exiled much longer ago, early in the life of the Solar System. Else we would have more pieces like what you have found, Lars. No, yours was perturbed back inward, probably by a close encounter with a big comet. That suggests the large one is still out there somewhere, not lost to interstellar space after all but in a wide and canted orbit. Perhaps someday we can find it. First we go to this little fellow."

Rydberg shrugged. "I don't know when we can do that, if ever."

Beynac bristled. "Hein?" he barked.

Rydberg picked up his neglected beer, took a draught, collected his words. "The existing situation,"

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he then said. "Guthrie would have underwritten an immediate expedition, but he was a dying man, and now he is dead. Everything is confusion while his download takes over, if his download can.

Factions in Fireball maneuver for advantage. Politicians fish in our troubled waters. Oh, even in far space we got plenty of news on the beams, and on my way home I was thinking what it meant.

Besides, the Alpha Cen-tauri project engages most of Fireball's discretionary resources, and will until it is well under way."

As was right, Dagny thought. Was not a launch to Sol's neighbor star Uncans's memorial to Juliana, whose vision it had been? A flyby miniprobe, followed by a versatile little craft packed with molecular-level instructions for building the robots that would do the science on those planets—

"Meanwhile your asteroid recedes, each daycycle harder and more expensive to reach, until it may well be lost forever." Beynac's rumble ascended to a roar. He sprang to his feet. "No! Bloody hell, no!" He shook a fist aloft, bounded to the wall and back, stood glaring around.

"You can apply for a research grant," Rydberg began.

"We can agitate for it," Dagny said.

She was surprised when Jinann spoke. She had known the girl shared the bitterness of her brothers.

"If we but had a ship of our own to go! Yet nay, never have they licensed us more than a few orbiters. Fear they we might smash down on Hiroshima?"

Well, how much did their parents know of anything in the breasts of Lunarian children?

"Getting approval would very likely take too long," Rydberg went on. "If nothing else, suitable robots are booked far in advance. That includes those not yet made and programmed. A human or two would have to go along in any event, to make the quick decisions when transmission lag is so great. I think you should first try if you can charter a vessel for a manned THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 241

expedition. Fireball has three or four to spare, if you can pay."

A tingle went along Dagny's nerves. "Brandir has plenty of money these daycycles. We could ask him." For the honor, or the aggrandizement, of his house and of Luna, he might be willing to lay some out. And maybe for love of his father?

Rydberg, her Lars, said soberly, because he disliked dramatics, "Besides the scientists, a qualified crew would be necessary. I could arrange it, and be the captain myself. That is if this is possible at all, which I do not promise."

"And I will be the chief geologist," Beynac said.

They stared at him. "What?" Rydberg exclaimed and, "You have won enough, Dada," Jinann protested in a voice she had not used for well-nigh two decades.

Dagny sat mute, remembering certain verses.

What is a woman that you forsake her, And the hearth-fire and the home-acre, To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

Standing above them, her 'Mond looked into her eyes and said, "Yes, I."

19

Wake up, man. Up! Time's a-wasting."

Dreams clung. Kenmuir struggled with them. They broke apart as he felt another quake. He opened his eyes. Aleka hunkered by the pallet, shaking his shoulder.

"C'mon, sleepyhead," she urged. "You've had a few hours. We've got heavy seas to weather."

He blinked. The shelter arched faintly mother-of-pearl, enclosing him in its small dome. The ground

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beneath was hard and cracked, the .air hot and mummy-dry. Seas?

Memory returned. It felt almost like another dream, the long drive from Iscah's place through night, he and she silent, fitfully dozing, till they reached—here— and after a few mumbled words with somebody he stumbled into this refuge. She'd joined him, nearby lay her own mattress and bedding, but now she was on her feet and outrageously refreshed.

He peered at his informant. The hour was 1310. He tried to whistle, but was too thirsty. Bit by bit, he climbed erect. He barely managed to fold a blanket around his waist. Aleka laughed. "Good boy," she said. "You knew you could do it if you tried."

"What's the program?" he croaked.

"Lunch with the padre. Be intelligent, or at least polite. I've fairly well got him talked over, but he wants to meet you before he agrees to anything. Understandable." Aleka cocked her head and smiled. "All right, I'll have mercy and let you clean up." She turned, parted the doorflap, and disappeared from him.

Padre? he thought vaguely. Oh, yes. Between them, Aleka and the two metamorphs had decided to send him and her to a Drylander camp—communications available—and, yes, this particular tribe, or whatever the word was, were Biocatholics. He'd once seen a documentary on that sect. Its members were few, sparsely scattered, intensely religious—what other force could drive their way of life?—but by no means retrograde. He'd better make a good impression.

A curtain hung in front of a portable washstand and sanitor. He noted the outlets by which they could be attached to a water reclamation unit. Losses to anything but evaporation and accidental spills must be rare. No, perspiration surely dissipated a lot. As quickly as possible, he availed himself, ending with a washcloth over his face and body. A comb hung on a chain. His last dose of beard inhibitor wouldn't wear off for a while yet. The clothes into which he scram-THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 243

bled had gotten a little grubby, but there was no help for that.

Feeling more alive, he trod forth. The sun stood furious in a sky like blue metal. He could barely make out the waning, westering Moon. No wonder Aleka Was in a hurry. They needed to make contact while it was still above this horizon. Relaying through stations on the ground could alert the system to them.

She took his arm. The touch was more cheering than it ought to be. "This way," she said. He accompanied her through the camp.

Hemispheres of varying size, according to how many occupied each, had been raised in an orderly array around a space left clear. Behind them, a transportable desalinator worked in a muddy remnant of the Salton Sea. Gray-white desolation stretched onward in that direction. Elsewhere, though, the land bore life, shrubs, cactus, gaunt trees, all growing widely apart in alkaline dust. Some, he knew, was native, but most was metamorphic, designed to thrive under these conditions and produce food, fiber, fuel, phannaceuticals. He spied individuals out there, afoot or on minicycles, inspecting, tending, applying the equipment that harvested the products.

Vehicles not in use stood parked offside, half a dozen trucks, two volants, four rugged cars besides the one that had brought him and Aleka.

Heat-shimmer blurred the distances. The air lay full of harsh aromas.

"Hola," greeted a passerby courteously.

"Uh, buenos dias," Kenmuir responded. Or was that correct? He wasn't a North American.

The man was a typical Drylander, thin, black-haired, yellowish-brown complexion, broad face, slit eyes, aquiline nose. A hooded white robe draped proudly over the huge buttocks. Such women as Kenmuir saw were similarly clad and even more steatopygous. In children the water-hoarding cells were less developed. People moved quietly, with an innate dignity, saying little. Not many were around.

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The temperature didn't bother them, but those that weren't out in the field were generally busy in the shelters. A group recital in sweet treble voices, from a large dome, told that a part of the activity was schooling.

The open space, common ground for meetings and for sociability after sunset, had four lamps on its perimeter. At the center, a crucifix lifted three meters tall. The cross was carved to represent a leafing tree, and the Christ was—not exactly metamprphic, but he had a suggestion of the alien about him—Startled, Kenmuir realized that he looked almost Lunarian.

That might not have been intended, the spaceman thought, but the underlying idea certainly was. A faith that sought to expiate man's sins against Mother Earth.... Inevitable, he supposed. When the first Drylanders were engineered to tolerate conditions like these, the deserts were still on the march. The rollback that later began deprived their race of any ultimate purpose in existence. So some among them created it for themselves. He wondered if any appreciated the irony that their credit was what enabled them to buy those necessities they couldn't produce or trade their meager output for.

Or was it irony? After all, they pooled their individual payments; material possessions were of small concern; distinction came from personal accomplishments, strength, skill, holiness. Maybe the difference between these neonomads—Legionarios was what the members of this tribe dubbed themselves, he recollected—and his Fireball Trothdom was they lived their ideals, while his kind played at their dreams. Who was happier? Who had better adapted to the cybercosm?

"We're here," Aleka said.

A shelter facing the square bore a fish symbol painted above the entrance. She went to stand before it and call softly, "Hola. Visitantes, por favor."

"Entrad en el nombre de Dios," replied a man's voice.

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They obeyed. The inside was nearly as plain as where they had slept, two pallets, a stump-legged table, a portable cuisinier and utensil rack, the curtained wash space. At the back was a primitive desk with shelves holding various items, including a reader and a miniature crucifix. A boy stood watching coffee brew; the fragrance reminded Kenmuir of how long ago it was he last ate.

Near the middle a man sat cross-legged on his great fundament. Though the hair was white and countenance deeply lined, he kept his back straight. From a chain around his neck hung an ankh carved out of coral.

"Padre Fernando, el capitan lan Kenmuir," Aleka said.

The priest raised his hand. "Bendecidos, hijos mios," he greeted.

"I, uh, pardon me—no hablo," Kenmuir faltered. Not for present purposes.

Fernando smiled. "We do deal with the outside world, Captain." His Anglo was only slightly accented. He gestured. "Pray be seated."

They lowered themselves to a pad, across the table from him. Kenmuir wondered if Aleka's garb counted as immodest here. But these folk didn't live in isolation, they watched their public multi and received occasional outsiders. "I hope you are well rested," Fernando said to him.

He shrugged, "Enough, /hope." That drew a chuckle. "Thank you."

A carafe and tumblers stood on the table. "We have a custom of welcome," Fernando said. He poured water and offered it. Remembering the documentary, Kenmuir sipped in respectful silence with the others.

"And now," Fernando laughed when they were done, "I imagine what you truly want is coffee." He beckoned. The boy carried over a tray with pot and cups, knelt to put them down, and retired.

Kenmuir barely restrained his eagerness.

"Padre," Aleka began after a minute, "I explained—"

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Fernando nodded. "Your time is short, if you are to call the Moon directly this day."

"You have the equipment."

Kenmuir's heart knocked.

"We do," Fernando said. "Not that transmission takes much wattage. It is our quantum-coding capability that you ask for."

What did these simple wanderers want with eavesdropper-proof communications? wondered Ken-muir. He thought back to Iscah and Spraya. Evidently the Legionaries weren't that simple either.

Intertribal messages—maybe ritual and knowledge reserved for church initiates, maybe coordination of plans to cope with the commerce and politics of a globe largely indifferent to a few eccentrics, or maybe just precaution left over from the times of active hostility— and the high-bandwidth channels available for this sort of thing were limited, so their license must go far back.. . .

Fernando continued, gravely: "The question is whether we should grant it. Forgive me. I neither accuse nor insinuate. But poor ones like us dare not get embroiled in quarrels."

"Nobody has to know," said Aleka brashly.

Fernando frowned. "They could learn." Indeed they could, Kenmuir reflected, if he or she was captured. Or would the hunters actually resort to brainphasing? He didn't want to believe that.

Nor did he want to sit passive. "Aleka," he inquired, "what have you told our ... our host?"

"Not everything by a long haul," she admitted. "Nor should you. As you say, Padre, your people ought not to be put at risk. All we want is to make a confidential call in a, uh, a cause worthy of your help." Mostly to Kenmuin "I've explained that we're working on behalf of a certain Lunarian association." Well, Lilisaire had her henchmen. She might also have a coequal ally or two on the Moon. "We're trying to find out about a matter involving the Habitat project, which everybody knows they oppose. The informa-THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 247

tion appears to have been concealed without any justification being publicly given, as the Covenant requires. We need to call for further instructions, while not being noticed by whoever is responsible."

"If anyone is," Kenmuir said. "It could be a misunderstanding."

"Or it could be too bloody right," Aleka snarled. "Maybe the sophotects are all morally perfect, but humans average as corrupt and greedy and power-hungry as always."

Fernando stroked his chin. "There is considerably more than that to your story," he said shrewdly.

"Don't fear, I will not interrogate you. Let us relax and talk of pleasant things."

The boy served a" vegetarian meal. After a brief blessing, Kenmuir discovered most of the food was new to him, and exotically seasoned. A decent white wine accompanied it.

Meanwhile, with intelligent questions and remarks, Fernando encouraged him to tell about his life.

He in his turn learned more about the Drylanders than he had known there was. No doubt Aleka had, earlier, similarly described her own background. Kenmuir much wanted to hear that himself.

At the end, Fernando said quite matter-of-factly, "Yes, you may make your call. Let me conduct you." Kenmuir realized with a slight shock that in this past hour the priest had been sizing his visitors up till he decided they were genuine.

They walked together through the camp. People crossed arms on breasts at sight of Fernando, and he signed benediction. Otherwise he commented along the way. "—desert rats are becoming an ecological problem, but a new disease of the protein tubers poses the immediate threat. Life simply will not stop mutating and evolving for our convenience, will it? Bioservice has developed a counteragent but naturally wants to study possible side effects before releasing it to us.... Our solstice festival. ... Younger people moving out, more and more. I wonder how many we 248

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would keep in this hard life if everybody had an alternative—"

The laser was in a truck, which Fernando unlocked. "Do you need help?" he asked. "I can" send for our communications officer."

Kenmuir looked inside. "No, thanks. I'm familiar with this model." It was rather an antique, but so was most of the remaining Lunarian space fleet. To modernize would have meant going entirely cybernetic, no more humans crossing space except as infrequent passengers. He could understand why the Legionarios held by their Legion, those who still did.

"And I know the encryption,"' Aleka added. One key, out of however many were in Lilisaire's possession.

"Muy bien, I will leave you," Fernando said. "For favor, lock again when you are done and come back to me." He went from them, lonely under the huge sky.

Kenmuir and Aleka climbed into the body of the truck and shut the door. A breathless furnace twilight dropped over them. They went to the set and stood for a moment unspeaking.

He cleared his throat. "Well!" he said against the hammering in his chest. "Let's get this done before we stifle."

'"The beam can't go straight to her castle," Aleka told him. "It might be traced back, if they're watching as closely as she thinks, and suddenly a squad would pounce on us. It'll skip randomly among several—"

"Yes, I know, and in any event I'm not a defective." Kenmuir stopped. "I'm sorry. That was uncalled for. I'm drawn too tight."

She smiled through the dimness. He grew aware of sweat beading her upper lip, the swell and cleavage at her partly open tunic, an odor of healthy flesh. "You're a kanaka '6i, Kenmuir," she murmured. Running a hand through her damp dark hair, she sighed. "As you say, we should get on with it."

Their fingers had little to do on the keyboard. The

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computer behind was only robotic, but it comprehended the task and went directly to work. The signal sought its first address, a relay satellite in Lunar orbit. This was not an official station, but Selenarchic, a tiny solar-powered automaton. It passed the coded message on according to instructions received, and so forth shiftingly, until the last transmitter took aim at Zamok Vysoki. To trace that changeable zigzagging back to Earth was quite impractical, and interception would be not just difficult but pointless. The laws of quantum mechanics protected the secrecy from anyone who did not know the key.

"I daresay somebody's wishing hard that the Covenant didn't guarantee privacy rights," Aleka remarked.

"It was drawn up in another era," Kenmuir replied absently. His attention was welded to the screen. "Fve seen arguments for amending it to fit new conditions."

"To control us closer?"

"M-m, they talk about conflicts between societies getting out of hand, sometimes murderously, and plots by one to harm another—" Human disorder, human unreason, dangerous anachronisms.

The screen brightened. A Lunarian face appeared. Kenmuir recognized Eythil of Mars.

"Captain," he acknowledged in Anglo. "How fare you?"

"Not well, as should be obvious," the Earthman retorted. "My associate and I must consult with the lady Lilisaire."

The image had gone impassive, as was Lunarian wont while waiting for photons to fly across space.

After about three seconds it frowned and said, "I think she is at rest."

Nightwatch; Luna didn't have time zones. Kenmuir wondered if Lilisaire was not in fact at carousal, or some subtler pleasure. "I assure you, this is urgent, and for her alone," he declared. "If she can't come to a

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pickup, tell me when I can try again. But I don't promise 111 be able to."

Lag.

"I will seek," Eythil said. "Hold." The screen blanked.

"I guess we could stay here till tomorrow." Aleka's voice was subdued in the silence. "We've probably broken our trail. But if they decide to bring in the entire system—"

Survey satellites, which could identify a man on the ground and see whether he laughed or wept.

Data searches, which could list virtually everybody on Earth who had ever had to do with Lilisaire, directly or indirectly. Inquiries called in to their unsuspecting communities. More data searches: Traffic Control's recent entries of whose vehicles had gone where. "Let's hope we're not that important," Kenmuir said.

Yet.

Time crawled. They found themselves standing hand in sweaty hand.

A head and shoulders in the screen, beautiful as a snowpeak, vivid as a flame. The auburn tresses were tousled but the green eyes altogether wakeful. "Hail," purred the Wardress. "What will you two of me?"

Kenmuir's clasp dropped free of Aleka's. His tongue locked. It was she who stood erect and gave a succinct account.

Lag. Lilisaire was smiling the least bit. Kenmuir stared and stared. Through the back of his head swirled bits of news he had gathered—Aleka was from Hawaii, she'd met an agent in San Francisco and that agent was a sophotect—what kept it from abandoning the Lunarian cause and merging with the cybercosm, if it had full intelligence?—but before him was the sight of Lilisaire.

She stirred. Her smile gave way to bleakness. "I belabored my wits most mightily about Pragmatic Venator," she said, half to herself. Who? For an instant, a grin flashed. "I did somewhat about him,

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too. A minor wile, but maychance we shall find a use for the outcome." She went serious again.

"You deem truly, swift action is vital, else are you lost. Aleka, the Carfax machine laid out for you my skeleton of a plan. Do you still think it bears any possibility?"

"Yes, if, if we can get access to the file," the Earthwoman answered. "I wonder now if that isn't double-guarded."

Lag. Lilisaire looked thoughtfully before her. Kenmuir lost himself in her eyes.

"I believe I have a means to that end," the Lunarian told Aleka. "Hear me. Captain Kenmuir shall go to a place where the pursuit will not likely seek him soon. Pick one that is not far from your ultimate destination, which you and Carfax have discussed. Let him abide there while you double back to—Kamehameha is the spaceport nearest you. I have prepared a thing which an agent of mine shall bring on the morn watch shuttle. He will be a Terran, I do not at this instant know precisely who but he will carry the name Friedrich and take a room at the Hotel Clarke. Meet him there, receive what he gives you, and rendezvous with Captain Kenmuir. Thence proceed according to plan and your own cunning. May fortune fare with you." Her tone glowed. "If you win to the truth, you shall have what was pledged you, in full and overflowing measure."

She settled back to wait, like a lynx for its prey.

Aleka swallowed. "I, yes, I'll try," she got out. "They don't suspect I'm involved, oh, surely not. Nobody will take any notice of me. Yes, I'll try, my lady."

The fear that she was mastering reached out into Kenmuir. He was being hunted. "What of me?" he cried. "What's my reward?"

Lag. Heat, thirst, longing, Aleka breathing at his side.

Lilisaire smiled anew. "I have told you, my captain," she answered like a song. "The cause of liberty

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and of humankind going to the stars. But you have right, that is abstract, and this is no longer a simple canvass you make but a fight that you wage. Eyach, then, would you be the chieftain over my emprises in space, and dwell with me as a seigneur among the Selenarchs? That will I gladly give you, my captain, if you come to me victorious."

Seconds drained away while he stood stunned.

Aleka nudged him.

Decision could not wait. He could say, "No," make his way to the authorities, and damn himself till he died. Or he could take the crazy hazard, jump into the unknown, very likely gain ignominy or death, at best go into a future of endless grief, jealousy, intrigue, homesickness—but he had no real home any more, did he?

"Yes," he called.

Through the time lag he looked at her face and understood, piece by hurtful piece, that whether or not he actually loved her, he desired her as a man lost in wilderness desires water and fire.

"Again will I kiss you," she said. Never in his knowledge had a Lunarian spoken thus to a Terran.

The screen blanked.

After a long while: "Bueno," blew from Aleka, "we're committed for sure, aren't we?"

"Why are you?" he asked dully.

"That's a long story, and we have to move. First, to get out of this oven." She plucked his sleeve. "Listen. It shouldn't take me more'n a couple of days to run her errand. What I'll do is take the car we came in to Santa Monica. At the airport I'll direct my volant to fly here and put itself at your service. That'll be tomorrow earlyish. Oh, yes, first I'lFve bought a change of clothes and suchlike for you and left them in the volant. And I'll send the groundcar back to Iscah, and catch a flight to Hawaii. Meanwhile you should be safe here, if you stay mostly under cover and put one of those cowls on you whenever you go out. 'the Drylanders have a code of hospitality, and their padre

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favors us. But once you've got transport, you'd better scramble."

"Where to?" he asked, powerless in his ignorance.

"Um, let me think. I oughtn't tell now where we'll be going when we've gotten back together, just in case. But Lilisaire's right, we should start from within an hour or two's hop of it. I'm not acquainted with the region either, but—C'mon, let's go conduct a data sweep,"

Fernando directed them to the dome that held computer terminals. They were for general use, but nobody else was there at the moment. Aleka set up a search for communities in midcontinent that were relatively isolated and self-contained. Predictions of cloud cover for the next few days were another factor. Before long she had made her choice.

"Bramland. Not too nice a place, according to this, but by that token, not apt to be friendly to the police. We'll flange up a plausible reason for you to give the locals, why you've flitted there to spend a while and why I'll be joining you. I'll put a chunk of cash in with those spare clothes and tilings I've promised you. Mainly, from now on keep your head down and your mouth shut. I know you can." She caught his hand. "I know we can."

Uncover what had been centuries hidden? Not for the first time—not for the first time—Kenmuir's mind withdrew pastward, blindly casting about for whatever clues might lie buried in history.

20

The Mother of the Moon

1 he view from the cafe* terrace was glorious. High on its hillside, Domme—stones brooding over narrow streets through which once rang the hoofbeats of knightly horses—looked down at the valley, across woods and fields and homes, to crests afar and the 254

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lordly summer sky of Earth. From the western horizon the sun wrought shadows and luminances; the river flowed molten gold among trees whose crowns were green-gold. A breeze awoke in what warmth yet lingered. Traffic sounds rolled muted beneath quietness.

Dagny sipped of her wine, a fragrant Bordeaux, set the glass down, leaned back, let her eyes savor. She and Edmond had the place nearly to themselves, which deepened her content. "Beautiful,"

she sighed. "How glad I am you chose this."

Across the little table he drank likewise. When he lowered his own glass, she heard how it clicked against the tiles. "You would rather have gone somewhere else?" She heard, too, the trouble in his voice. *,'You did not say."

She met his gaze and smiled. "I wanted the choice to be yours," she answered, "and knew you'd most want to see your Dordogne again."

"But it is your holiday also."

"Well, you knew I've liked the area whenever we've visited." A misleading way to speak, she thought. Their times on the planet had been so few., so brief, and he always ready to go along with her wishes. How often to southern France? Thrice, counting now. She wanted to say something about that, but something else was more important. "This trip I've come to love it." She was being honest, though she understood how much of the reason lay in him, his joy that made her joyful.

"Thank you."

He smiled back, just a bit. They were silent a while. The sun went down. A flight of rooks crossed a heaven still blue.

Edmond stirred. "Dagny—"

She waited, expectant without urgency, in the manner she had learned was best. Quick with assertion, rage, laughter, he could have difficulty uttering what lay him closest.

"I have meant to say this," he went on after a few THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 255

seconds, "but I was not sure how. I am not. But I should try."

"Your tries generally work out fine, mon vieux," she told him.

He struggled. "I am going soon to space because of you." Hastily: "I mean, thanks to you."

A disclaimer might ease things for him. "Really, you owe a lot more to Lars and Brandir."

"They did well, and I appreciate it," he said, "but you made their efforts possible. You—pulled the wires, cleared the path." He forced a chuckle. "Can you today help me with my metaphors?"

She wondered what he was leading up to. He'd acknowledged her role often before. Memory flitted back across those past months. Governor Zhao, yes, he'd been the main opponent, issuing his decree that forbade the expedition, insisting that this was the law and exemption must be gotten from the High Council of the World Federation, knowing full well how easily that could be choked in committee. A problem of hers was that she continued to like the old bastard and .believe he meant well. She thought he was more than half sincere about the hazards that might arise1 if Lunarians took to space in any numbers. As for the rest of his motivation, he'd told her that there was enough nationalism, dangerous enough, on Earth, without allowing anything that might encourage the tumor to grow on the Moon. Maybe he had a point. Besides, he and she usually ended their private talks with his playing some music for the sake of their spirits, and it was through him that she had come to Beethoven's last quartets... . Occasionally she must needs fight him.

She recalled her mind to the present. Edmond had made a joke. Let her too try lightening things.

She grinned. "I know where various bodies were shoveled under." She had, in fact, enjoyed putting the screws on Commissioner Zacharias till he leaned on the governor.

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Seeing Edmond serious again, she released what rose within her: "And eventually, you know, eventually I got through to ... the download. In spite of the woes he's having with Fireball, he found time for whatever he did behind the scenes to get the ban lifted." Guthrie's analog, the ghost of Uncans, had remembered—She swallowed. "I think mainly you've got him to thank."

"Speaking with him that first time, it was not easy for you," Edmond said. "None of this was. I could feel. Sometimes at night, beside me, you caught your breath."

He had been aware, then. He had been so fully aware that he kept still. Her eyes stung. "Oh, darling, you, you've thanked me aplenty already for my part."

"Yes," he replied slowly, "but never before have I thanked you for why you did it."

"For excellent reasons," she said in her briskest tone. "Science. Adventure. Kaino's wish as well as yours. A liberating precedent. A healthy kick to the fat gut of the Lunar Authority. All in all, a very worthy cause."

"My cause. / am going. I will be gone for months, perhaps in danger. You do not want this."

She looked straight at the Cro-Magnon face. "However, you do," she said.

He nodded. "Exactly. I am not glad to leave you, but I am glad to go. Does that make sense to you?

You hate it, but for my sake you worked for it. You—you love me that much."

The blood beat in her temples. "I don't hold with caging eagles," was the best response she could find. "No, bears, in this case." She leaned across the table and rumpled the iron-gray hair. "Good ol' bear!"

"I... only want to stay ... I understand," he mumbled.

"And I understand that you understand, and that makes me happy," she said, blinking the tears away from the sight of him. "Okay, *Mond, let's enjoy. Drink up and we'll go in search of dinner."

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Day was becoming dusk. When they rose, Dagny felt the weight on her bones. In none of her earlier returns had Earth been this heavy. Well, time in the centrifuge and time in the medical program did not stop time. Maybe she'd never again come back here from the Moon. But not to worry about that, she told herself. Not now, this now that she had with her man.

Sacajawea was the best that Fireball could provide, a Venus-class transport, well-designed, soundly built, but not one of the fantastic new torchcraft that would have made the crossing in a pair of weeks. Those were still few and committed for long periods ahead. Sacajawecfs main service had been in the Asteroid Belt. For the journey to Rydberg's rock she accelerated at less than one-fifth g, to spare the Lunarians aboard, until she attained trajectory speed; thereafter she fell free for more than a hundred daycycles before the hour came to brake for rendezvous.

Weightless that long, no matter how diligently he exercised, a Terrestrial would have taken six or seven rehabilitative weeks back on Earth to regain his full strength, skeletal and muscle mass, coordination, reflexes, body chemistry. At that, he would risk some of the changes being irreversible; resilience varies among individuals. A Lunarian, returned to his own home, would have done better, but not recovered overnight. To meet whatever they were going to meet, Beynac and his men should arrive in good condition. Besides, gravity would be feeble at their goal. Thus everyone was much in the whirly.

That machine had barely room in its compartment for a three-meter swing radius. Wire strands held a narrow platform, opposite which a one-tonne lead sphere counterrotated at the end of an adjustable arm. You did most of your drill parallel to the board, pushups, bicycles, mass-lifting with arms and legs. For the standing motions you rose very carefully; if the brain goes fast through a sudden drop in weight of some sixty percent, vertigo and nausea are the least of 258

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the possible consequences, and you must likewise be wary of Coriolis force. Although your belt and its leash, attached to the center post, kept you from being slung off, a bone-breaking accident could easily happen. It was well to hold onto that post during your knee bends and jogs. You certainly required it when you stood on your head and your heart pushed blood upward more or less as nature intended.

Beynac was among those who could keep their eyes open meanwhile without getting sick. Being alone, he could sing songs when he had breath to spare, the bawdier the better. Nevertheless he disliked such sessions; and here, in microgravity, they demanded more time per daycycle than on the Moon.

Eventually he wearied of his repertory, fell silent, and combatted monotony with memories and thoughts.

They went back to Kaino. "Had we Lunarians our ships, this were no necessity," the young man had said, a few watches ago at mess. "For us, at any rate; and for Earthling passengers, no worse than on our world. We would accelerate throughout the voyage."

"If you could afford a fleet of torchcraft, you would have no need to trade across space," Beynac bantered him. "You could just wallow in your money."

Kaino scowled. "Does Fireball sit back wile?" His words shook with longing. "To go—And we'd not buy the ships, we'd build them."

"Even then, my son, it's not economic to boost the whole way, except for special purposes."

"We'd make it be! But who dares set us free? Often did Guthrie sneer at government, but never did he move to push it off us. He too feared us."

Beynac was about to reply that that was nonsense. A spacefaring enterprise ought rationally to welcome able newcomers. Competition would be no problem; the existing lines had more calls on them than they could meet. However, powerful though Fireball was, there were limits to its influence.

Rydberg forestalled him. "I have looked at the parameters of Lunarian astronautics," the captain THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 259

said in his methodical fashion. "Given access to antimatter at a reasonable price, torching may well become profitable for many kinds of haul, if not every kind. Accelerating at a constant one-sixth g. a Lunarian crew would not need centrifuge time. Therefore they could be fewer, perhaps solo. Speed at turnover would be proportionately lower than for a full g, therefore less fuel-costly. Of course, transit time would be greater, by a factor of approximately the square root of six, but that would make no large difference in the inner System. Even this crossing of ours would have taken only about a month."

He had been right to steer the conversation away from politics, Beynac thought. When six men, two of them Lunarian, were cramped together for week after week after week, nerves wore thin.

Would it have helped if two or three were female? That was common practice on missions for Fireball, if not every spaceline. But no, Dagny had doubtless been right when she argued against it (and, her husband suspected, was the one who got the company to make all-male a condition of the charter). Given the Lunarian temperament, whether you believed it was genetic or cultural, the potentialities might be explosive.

Beynac laughed a little. She needn't have worried about him on that account, if she did. From the first, she had been woman enough for him, "and then some," as her North Americans would put it.

His duty to his body was done for the nonce. He could go toss this drenched, smelly sweatsuit in the cleaner, sponge-bathe, don his coverall, and, oh, seek his cubicle, he supposed, play a show before next mess. He hadn't watched The Marriage of Figaro for years. Earphones. He was the single man aboard who cared for opera. Terrestroid Moondwellers, isolated both from Earth and from their children, were apt to keep archaic tastes.

He touched the off switch. His weight dropped as the centrifuge whirred to a halt, until he hung in

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midair between the slack cables. Reaching out for a handhold,-he pulled himself and the platform to a stanchion, used his safety belt to secure the gymnastic equipment, and started for the door.

It opened. Ilitu looked in. "Ah, sir, I awaited your loosing," he said.

"Is anything wrong?" Beynac asked. He became conscious of how lonely the ship was, a metal bubble adrift through the thin seething of the cosmos.

"Nay. It is but that they have acquired a good optical of the asteroid. I thought you would like to see it at once."

"Yes, indeed. Thank you." Beynac followed his graduate student forward through the axial passage.

The consideration touched him. This wasn't the first friendly gesture Ilitu had made. He was more—all right, more human, more open than most Lunarians. Sometimes Beynac fe!t closer to him than to any of his sons and daughters.

Lars Rydberg, Antonio Oliveira, and Manyane Nkuhlu had evidently watched their fill. Kaino floated alone in the control cabin. He was always eager to stand pilot watch, including somebody else's, when he wasn't increasing his skills in a simulator he had insisted be taken along. His red head nodded curtly, eyes held hard on the viewscreen. Beynac came to it, checked his flight, stared, and softly whistled.

Radar had already established the dimensions of the asteroid. Rugged, lumpy, broader<at one end than the opposite, it would have fitted inside a cylinder about 300 kilometers long and a hundred wide. At maximum useful magnification, as yet it seemed tiny in the night everywhere around. The hue was slaty, spotted with blacknesses that must be the deepest irregularities, save for a broad flat grayness near the middle. At the edge of this jutted something like a needle: a crag or peak, sharp against the dark. Rotation was just perceptible. Falling outward from the sun, the body wobbled around a skewed axis once in about five hours, as if tossed by a careless giant.

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Seen in the Belt, it would have been fairly interesting. Sacajawea, though, had come four billion kilometers farther, out near the marches of the comets.

"Out, tu voila," Beynac whispered; and louder, for the rest to hear: "We tracked you down, by bloody damn."

When her chime sounded, Dagny went in Lunar leaps down the hall to the vestibule. At the door she hesitated. Her heart thuttered. Nobody in Tychopolis felt they needed a peephole or exterior scanner. This might be a casual, unannounced visitor—She didn't want it to be. Not really. She set her jaw and retracted the door. Beyond ran Hudson Way, a corridor lined with planters where roses grew against trellises, a neighbor's entrance catercorner across it. Every sense heightened, she caught the odor of the flowers as acutely as a swordthrust.

The robot that loomed there, two meters tall, was startlingly humanlike, suggestive of a medieval suit of plate armor. (No, not when you paid heed to the Joints, the powerpack, the turret with its speaker and sonic sensors and ring of optics.) She had seen it on a newscast, because it was unique, an impractical shape for a machine unless the machine had some such purpose as this today.

For a moment she and it stood motionless. The city hummed low in their hearing.

"Hello," the robot said.

Dagny had heard that voice before, on a broadcast, on her phone, in her memory. It was Anson Guthrie's, not hoarsened as in his last years but strong and resonant. Defying every resolution, a wave of weakness passed through her.

She fought it down. "W-welcome," she said.

"May I come in?"

The robot spoke shyly, half unsurely. It must have been forceful enough, making whatever arrangements it did to keep a gaggle of curiosity seekers from tailing it here, but she realized that now it didn't know quite

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what to say either, and drew strength from the knowledge. That's what you came for, isn't it? she was tempted to reply. She curbed the impulse, mumbled, "Of course," and stepped aside.

Ought she to shake hands?

The robot passed by, a graceful movement, marvel-ous design behind the bluish-white metal. Dagny shut the door. "Gracias," the robot said, and stopped. She imagined it scanning this entry, oak-paneled walls, antique mirror, picture of the Washington coast, a tiny monument to an Earth that scarcely existed any longer. The turret didn't move. The computer within transferred its regard from the input of one pair of lenses to the next, around a full circle.

By itself out in the open, Dagny recalled, the computer had just two optic balls, protruding on stalks from the case that housed it. The robot was not its body, was not it, was merely a vehicle in temporary use.

Suddenly she could not, would not, think of "it" Something, at least, of Guthrie was here, and he had been totally male. By right of inheritance, the download bore the name. Let him also bear the gender.

"Same layout as before," he said, a little easier in his tdne. The experts claimed he had moods, feelings, maybe different now but nonetheless real. "I wondered" whether you'd changed things.

Been a long time, hasn't it?"

"Yes," she answered. "Six years, seven?"—since last he, the original he, guested her and 'Mond.

Afterward they had met once on Earth (how aged he had gotten, though salty as ever) and had talked occasionally by phone almost until the end ... "This way, please." She led him through the hall to the living room.

He halted near the center. She had set the viewscreen for a direct presentation, an outlook from the top of the ringwall. A wilderness of shadows and softly lighted upthrusts fell away to the near horizon. A Criswell collector shouldered above yonder THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 263

worldrim, the single brightness in all that land. Overhead arched night, Earth waxing through the second quarter, blue-and-white majesty. She wasn't sure why she had chosen this, rather than one of her usual scenes recorded on the mother planet. Maybe, down underneath, she hadn't wanted to raise any pretense, or hadn't dared.

"Nothing much changed here, either," Guthrie observed.

She found that she too could make conversation. "Well, you know how old married couples get set in their ways."

"I'd hardly say that of you and 'Mond. Not yet. Probably never. Him off to hell-and-hooraw in space. You directing the construction at Astrebourg and, I gather, making the governor's life miserable whenever he deserves it."

No pretense! But what instead? Dagny bit her lip. "I don't know what to—to offer you—"

A short laugh boomed. "Not a cup of tea." A hand gestured, that looked as if it were forged in a furnace but had been grown in a nanovat. "Sit down if you like." The voice dropped. "I can. I won't crumple your chair, here on the Moon."

"No need for me, really—here on the Moon," she said.

They fell mute.

Guthrie broke through: "Is Caria—is Jinann still living with you?"

"Yes," Dagny said, "but she's tending her jewelry shop. I told her to phone before coming, and that I might want her to sleep elsewhere."

"Why, for Pete's sake?" he exclaimed, precisely the way the man would have done. Her heart cracked. *Td like to see her again, and your whole family."

"Again?" broke from her. She gasped, appalled. "Oh! Oh, God, I'm sorry."

"Don't be," he said gently.

"I didn't mean—"

"I know you didn't."

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"Excuse me." She sought the table on which she had set out a decanter and several glasses. They were several because either a single glass or a pair would have uttered what had escaped her lips.

Shakily, she poured a stiff slug and tossed off a fourth of it. The whisky smoked over tongue and gullet, bound for the bloodstream. She'd guessed the need might arise.

"No offense taken," he was saying. "I make no bones about my condition." A chuckle. "Nope, no bones at all."

This had been his favorite Scotch. He had introduced her to it—how long ago? And now he would never taste it, never, unless maybe in an electronic virtuality-dream. Dagny turned about to confront him. "I shouldn't be like this," she protested bitterly. "Stupid old bat."

He stroked hand across lower turret, as Guthrie had stroked his chin, and drawled, "I wouldn't apply any of those words. You're not just smart, you remain a damn sexy wench, Diddyboom."

She blinked and blinked. She would not cry.

Doubtless he noticed, for he added in haste: "I speak abstractly about such things, these days.

But I've got my memories."

"Y-yes."

"His memories," Guthria said, once more serious. "Should I have put it that way?"

"I don't know." She took another swallow.

"It's true. Sure. They pumped his nervous system full of nanoseanners, encoded what came out, used that to program a neural network custom-built to be an exact analog of his particular brain .. .

Bueno, no point in rehashing it for you. I'm his aftermath."

How much could a download hurt? Dagny drew breath. "Nevertheless, you soldier on." His words, after Juliana died. What comfort might there be for a download? "Because they made you to be him."

"To be like him, in certain ways," Guthrie corrected. "No more than that." He was quiet for a space.

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"When I called on him at his deathbed, I learned, or I was reminded of, several things about being a man."

Against her will, Dagny shivered. "The world's gone eerie, hasn't it?"

"I figure it always was," came the familiar tone. "How'd one of 'Mond's cavemen have reacted, seeing you in your simple small-town girlhood? What changes is just the kind of eeriness."

The whisky began to warm her. "You are—quite a bit like .. . Uncans," she ventured.

She believed that he thought a smile. "Gracias. I try."

"Because Fireball needs you. We all need you."

"That was the general idea. Personally, I take no stock in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, or the indispensable man. But, yeah, there are loose ends to tie up before I can quit in reasonably good conscience."

The chill struck back. "Quit."

"Stop," he said almost lightly. "Turn off. Wipe out. Whatever you call it."

Cease to be. She drank afresh and gained courage to ask: "Do you want to?" When he could abide for thousands of years, maybe forever.

Mostly the robot stood moveless. Sometimes he appeared to remember body language. He shrugged.

"Oh, I'm not sorry for myself. Por favor, credit me with analog guts. This is a hell of an interesting universe yet. But between us, and swear by Dr. Dolittle you won't quote me, being alive was better."

She shuddered. Never for her!

Yes, he was powerful, he had wonders open to him that mortals could barely imagine. Poor, brave wraith. "You always did your duty as you saw it, didn't you?" Dagny said. "Coming to me, in person, when you're so busy and harassed, that's Christly kind of you. That's my Uncans."

Again he spoke awkwardly, while he shuffled a foot. "Um, well, my image when I make a public speech— it was a mistake using it when I phoned you, Dagny. I 266

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saw right away what a mistake it was, and I'm no end sorry."

She recalled the pain, but dimly, as if across more than the few real-time daycycles. A synthesized audiovisual of Anson Guthrie in his vigorous middle age, controlled by the download as the living brain controls the living face, could inspire thousands or millions of watchers, or knife a solitary granddaughter. "That's, okay," she mumbled.

"No, it isn't, and I aim to try and set it right," he insisted. "You're not one for smarmy fakes."

He lifted his hands toward her. "Let's get straight with each other, you and me." The timbre levelled. "Because I hope we'll be working together pretty often in the future, same as you did with him."

Him? she thought. A separate and lost being? What was a mind, a self, a soul, anyway?

"Thank you," Dagny breathed. "Thank you more than I can ever say."

He had laid the ghost in her to rest.

With a long low-weight step, she went over to him and took the outreaching hands in her own. They felt a little cold, but their massiveness reminded her of Uncans's hands.

"Oh, Dagny," he said. When she let go, he hugged her, very quickly and gently.

That was the real reason he came, she thought. He had loved her. He still did.

It was a senseless accident that killed Edmond Bey-nac. But then, every accident is senseless, as is most of history.

"No, this is not the ancient lost body of my hypothesis," he had explained to Manyane Nkuhlu after his first quick survey upon it. The spaceman knew little geology but was interested in learning.

"Bloody hell, I made that clear even before we left. No? Eh, bien. you were busy at the start, and later did not chance to listen.

"What we have here, it is principally metals, iron, THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 267

nickel, et cetera, which were once fused. That means it is a piece from the core of a body large enough to have melted and formed a core—which it is not itself, do you understand? The flat section, that is the fracture where it was broken loose in a great collision. But I do not think that collision shattered the big planetoid entirely into minor objects like this. Such an impact would leave different traces. Quite possibly the force did push the major part and the fragments knocked off it into a more eccentric path, and this was when Jupiter seized them and flung them outward. If they did not escape the Solar System, the new orbit was enormous, and during billions of years, passing stars would raise its perihelion farther yet."

"The new orbit?" asked Nkuhlu. "You can't mean that the pieces stayed in a group, on an identical course."

Beynac's hand chopped air. "No, no, of course not. However, the tracks must have been closely similar. And off in the Oort Cloud—yes, the comets there are many, but how far apart, in that huge volume! The pieces would seldom be much perturbed, the massive one least. Gradually, true, their cluster would disintegrate. Doubtless a comet changed the orbit of this piece drastically. Now its perihelion is scarcely more than it was in the beginning.

"That cannot have happened very long ago, a few millions of years perhaps, because the present orbit is unstable. The encounter was most likely near the former perihelion. Closest to the sun, the density of comets is a bit higher. This suggests the major body is not at its most distant from us. We may be able to compute backward through time and get an idea of where to search for it—"

Beynac lifted his palms and threw back his head. "But plenty of lecture!" he laughed. "My academic habits took me over. I will find you educational practical experience, my friend."

That may have been among the factors which, weeks later, joined to destroy him. Unlike most of 268

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the others, it was not random. Shorthanded, under-equipped, his research needed whatever help he could marshal. He and Ilitu were not able to handle the drilling, digging, and collecting that it demanded. Their time in the field went mainly to general exploration, search for promising sites.

In their laboratory aboard Sacajawea, they prepared samples for examination, studied them, built piecemeal a knowledge of the asteroid and its story. Once in a while they exercised in the centrifuge, washed, ate, or slept.

Doctrine required that a man who could singly bring the vessel home be always shipside. This meant either Rydberg or Kainp. Actually, it oftenest meant both, the former working to heighten the skill of the latter. Nkuhlu and Oliveira were free.

The arrangement had been planned at the outset. Beynac welcomed such an opportunity for his son, now when Fireball's leaders were beginning to see what advantages might lie in having a few Lunarian pilots. Nkuhlu and Oliveira were experienced rock-jacks. They had acquitted themselves well in operations on stony bodies and treacherous comet ice.

They were technicians, not scientists or engineers. But probably no one could have foreseen the danger. Our sole sureness is that every fresh venture into the universe will meet with surprises, Never before had humans walked on anything quite like the fracture plane across this cosmic shard.

About ten kilometers long and twenty wide, it gashed transversely near the middle of the rough cylindroid. Around it was rock, lighter material that had overlain the primordial core and stuck to it through the sundering crash or, immediately afterward, fell back in a half-molten hail. Dark and rough reached that surface. Meteoritic strikes to wear it down and crater it had been rare in those realms where the fragment wandered. The plain of the plane stoo'd forth stark amidst this stonescape, its sheen faintly grayed by dust, its pockmarks few and wide-scattered.

On the Orionward edge of that scar reared the peak

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Beynac had seen from space. The collision must also have formed it, a freakishness of forces at this special point. Maybe a shock wave focused by a density interface had hurled liquefied metal upward in a fountain that congealed as it climbed. The height was not a mountain but a spire, swart, outlandishly twisted and gnarled, a sheer 1500 meters from the rubble at its base to the top, which hooked forth like an eagle's beak over the flat ground of the fracture.

At its back, rock wasteland lay in tiers and jumbles. When you fared yonder afoot, you saw a strip that was barely thirty meters wide between the jagged horizons to left and right but that lost itself in murkiness for more than a hundred kilometers ahead. Standing benaath the spire and gazing in the Other direction, you saw the plain, well-nigh featureless, bordered by stars on either side and by a riven escarpment opposite you, twenty kilometers away. Above loomed a dark that at night was crowded with constellations, glowingly cloven by the Milky Way, haunted by nebulae and sister galaxies. Then the sun tumbled aloft, shrunken to a point but still intolerably fierce, radiant more than five hundred times full Moonlight on Earth. The visible stars became few, but the spindle of Sacajawea, in her companion orbit, might gleam among them. Weight likewise gave a faint sense of not being altogether lost from manhome. It was ghostly at the ends of the asteroid, but here, close to the ccntroid of a ferrous mass, it exceeded a tenth Thus the scene where Edmond Beynac died.

"Go up onto the peak," he ordered Nkuhlu and Oliveira. "Along the way, take pictures and gamma readings as usual. What I want you to bring down in your packs is some pieces of the top — exact locations laser-gridded, do not forget this time, by damn! Yes, and a core, a meter or two deep.

Plus a seismic sounding. I need to know the inside of this thing. Just how in bloody hell did it happen?"

He respected the men, therefore he did not add

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what was obvious, that he had given them a difficult, perhaps dangerous assignment. Himself, he went with Ilitu into the badlands on the farther side of the scar. There he had found another enigma to investigate, strata where theory said no strata should be.

The ascent by Nkuhlu and Oliveira turned into a small epic of the kind that goes as undertones through every heroic age. Gravity was low but gear was massive and the faces to climb precipitous.

An hour might be spent in peering at the next stage before attempting it. At that, thrice one man or the other would have fallen to his death, had he not slammed short on a line attached to his well-anchored partner. Life support labored, spacesuits grew hot, breath harsh, mouths dry; rest was measured in minutes on a ledge, doles of water sucked from a tube, rations and stimulants pushed through a chowlock—until at last, shaky-kneed on the summit, the pair looked down at desolation and out into immensity.

Thereupon the real work began. Never before had they wrestled with such stuff as this. It was not rock, it was metal; it was not uniform but multiply and intricately alloyed, a tangle of layers, encysted lumps, and vacuoles. When an ion torch cut free a sample, white-hot gobbets might spit back. When a sonic pulse went downward, the whole footing might tremble.

What caused the disaster was a shaped minicharge. It should simply have split an anomalous plumbic vein, to produce recoverable specimens. Instead, the explosion found a resonance. Weaknesses unstressed for billions of years gave way. The eagle's beak broke apart. A dozen huge, a hundred lesser chunks fell.

Beynac and Ilitu had emerged back on the plain, out of a crevice where their headlamp lights touched on mysteries. They were bound diagonally across, toward the dome shelter at the far corner and the gig that should bear them again to their ship. The walls around them had screened out radio. Else Beynac would have heard his helpers, vocally recording each THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 271

thing they did. He might have warned them. Or he too might not have guessed.

He and his companion were well into the open when the overhang sundered. Tiny at their distance, the rocks went slowly at first. They accelerated, though, worse than a meter per second for every second that passed. They hit bottom at over two hundred kilometers per hour. In most places they would have bounced to a quick stop. Here the ground was smooth and hard. Friction, never much in low gravity, was almost nil. Moreover, the plain was not truly level. The increase of weight toward the asteroi-dal center of mass gave it a slight but real downslope.

Oliveira and Nkuhlu went on their bellies and gripped anything they could while the peak shook beneath them. Dust, cast high when the stones landed, briefly obscured heaven. It arced down.

Rising to their feet, they saw boulders and gravel fan outward across the iron of the plain, a sleetstorm aimed for the two figures at its middle.

Now they heard a radio cry. "Nom de Dieu! A bos, Ilitu! Drop you, drop, God damn!" No man could dash clear of what was coming. The geologists flung themselves prone. Still they saw the rocks leap, bound, roll toward them. They felt those soundless impacts as drumbeats up through suits, flesh, bones. Sparks flew, momentary stars below the stars. There was time to think, remember, even speak.

Ilitu, Lunarian, hissed defiance. Beynac called, steady-toned, "If I do not survive, tell my Dagny I loved her." Otherwise he ignored the frantic voices from spire and ship. But when the storm reached him, he transmitted, surely unawares, "O Maman, Maman— "

Ilitu was lucky. A pebble pierced his garb, drew blood from a shoulder, and exited. The holes promptly self-sealed. As for Edmond Beynac, a lump the size of his fist smashed open his helmet.

Air puffed away into emptiness.

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That is a kindly death. You are unconscious within seconds, gone very soon thereafter.

His sons met with their mother in her home on the Moon.

"Later, yes, we shall bring more folk into the circle," Brandir said. "This evenwatch must be ours alone."

Like her and his brothers, he was standing. Behind him stretched the big viewscreen. Its mobile view of the River Dordogne, green valley and a castle on the heights beyond, seemed doubly remote from his tall, black-and-silver-clad form, the long pale hair and the features that were not wholly Asian nor of any other race upon Earth. And yet, Dagny thought, he too dwelt like a baron of old in his towered mountain

i JM til C*1S

"Why?" she asked. Why not, at least, his sisters?

Because, she realized, these men had not come to mourn with her. For she heard: "We have our father to avenge."

"What?" she exclaimed. Punish a barren bit of wreckage?

No. This new generation was strange but sane. If anything, below the cavalier style lay an inborn realism colder than she liked to think about. Language mutates. "What exactly do you mean?" she demanded.

Kaino was the most outspoken among them. Through his lifespan she had heard him enraged, rancorous, sarcastic, hostile, but never so bleak: "We've a reckoning to make with them who wrought his bane."

Chill touched her. "Wait!" she cried. "Those two poor guys who touched off the rockfall? No!" She filled her lungs, captured his eyes, and declared to them all, "I forbid you."

When the ship returned, she had taken the pair aside to give what consolation she was able. "I don't

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pardon you," she said, "because I have nothing to pardon. Nobody could have known." Oliveira wept and kissed her hands. Nkuhlu saluted as he would have saluted Anson Guthrie.

Brandir swept an impatient gesture. "Needless," he replied. "Innocence is theirs. I grant them my peace." His arrogance bore for Dagny a curious innocence of its own, akin to a cat's. "It is the Earth lords to whom we owe ill."

"Had we had a vessel that was ours," Kaino said between his teeth, "and a Lunarian crew—"

"I would have sent him afare well-manned, and geared with the best that technics offers," Brandir stated.

By now he could probably afford the cost, Dagny thought. His enterprises—the undertakings of those mostly young persons who had pledged fealty to him—were enwebbing the globe. Barred, though, among many things, were the building of spacecraft and any Moondweller enterprise more distant than to Earth.

"Lunarians would have had a sense for whatever traps lay in wait," Kaino said.

"Belike not fully they, either," Temerir answered.

Dagny's glance went to him. Her third son generally kept silent until he saw reason to make some pointed remark. Slight, gray-eyed, pallid, he stood in his plain blue coverall as a contrast to Brandir's elegance and Kaino's flamboyancy. But his was the most purely Lunarian face of the three.

"Nay," Brandir agreed. "Yet would the odds have been better."

"And the venture ours," Kaino added.

Brandir turned to Dagny. "This be the vengeance we take and the memorial we raise," he said, "that we break the ban of the overlords and set Luna free in space. Mother, we ask your aid."

Dagny's pulse wavered, recovered, and beat high.

They could not bring about a change in the law

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without her, she knew. They might amass the wealth of dragons, but politically they were dwarfs, in large part because they lacked the gifts of born politicians.

Not that oratory, truth-shading, backroom bargains, wheedling, compromise, blackmail, bullying, bribery, promise-breaking, lip service, and self-puffery were very natural to her. "I, I don't know," she stammered.

Her look went past Brandir to the Dordogne view. It had moved to a mossy spot along the shore, oh, could this be the same spot where she and "Mond came walking hand in hand, stopped, skimmed stones across the water, sat down on damp softness and let sun pour through them while he laid his arm about her waist and kissed her? His chin was a little scratchy ...

It was as if ice abruptly thawed. She had wolf-howled that first nightwatch alone after the news came, but things beyond counting were necessary to do and say, smiles beyond counting were necessary to manufacture, therefore let the automaton run through its program and at bedtime switch off. The emptiness could await her leisure, it would never go away.

At this instant—

Abide a little longer, only a short while more. Then she could loose the tears. Then she could go through his desk, his clothes, his books, the database of his calls and messages to her when he was in the field, all of their years, daycycle by daycycle. Then she could know with her whole being that he was gone into forever, and come to terms with the fact, and warm her hands at his memory.

Not yet, not quite yet. At this instant, the eyes of his children toward her like guns, she had work to do. The triune god of Edmond Beynac had been kinship, truth, and freedom.

She straightened. Her muscles pleasured in the movement. "Okay," she said. "I'll try. I'll do my bloody damnedest."

Politics was more than fraud and brutality, she

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thought. In fact, most of it was honest, was simply the means by which people ordered the affairs they had in common. Suppose she started by approaching Technocommissioner Lefevre. He and 'Mond had been pretty close ...

Kaino embraced her. He hadn't done that since he was ten.

She would not cry.

He drew back. She said quickly, "Don't expect miracles. I may or may not get something going. At best, it'll take a long time, and we'll have to scrabble for allies."

Brandir nodded. "Aught you may need that we three can provide, you shall have," he said,

"including our patience."

"Well, to begin with, your sisters—Verdea, anyway. She might stir up the kind of general sentiment we'll want," as Shelley and Byron did for the liberation of Greece, Solzhenitsyn for Russia, Jaynes for North America.

"And Fia, yes, I think Fia," Brandir murmured.

Helen, black-tressed, russet-eyed, reserved, formal, secretive, save where it came to music ...

Carla-Jinann, no, until matters got to the stage of emotional pressure, speeches, parades, demonstrations, appeals, at which point she could be a valuable link between Moondwellers, demonstrative Terrestroid and aloof Lunarian. .. .

"How long estimate you?" Kaino blurted at Dagny.

His yearning cut at her. "I don't know, I told you," she sighed.

"I also must drink of time," Temerir said.

Surprised, she regarded him where he stood limned against her flowers and asked, "What? Why?"

"I mean to search after the great planetoid that Father dreamed of," the astronomer answered.

Brandir was having his personal observatory built for him on Farside. "The hunt will likely consume years. That is the more so because it shall be our secret."

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"Huh? A scientific project secret? You'll sneak time for it when nobody's looking? How come, for Christ's sake?"

He spread his fingers. His parents would have shrugged. "Father's emprise won clues for me to follow. But few ever paid much heed to his notions about the early Solar System. Those were taken for the idiosyncracy of an elsewise mighty mind. It should be easy to let the matter slide back into obscurity—with your help, Mother. Who foreknows what a Lunarian may someday discover?" The wintry gaze sharpened upon her. "Unless all here tonight pledge muteness, I will not make the seeking I wish to make in honor of Edmond Beynac."

A shiver passed through Dagny. Was this, in his way, the most formidable of her sons?

21

Seen from above, the plains reached endless, a thousand mingling hues of green below a'summer sky of the same vastness. Often a wind sent waves through the grasses, swift and shadow-delicate; Kenmuir could well-nigh hear them rustle, smell the odors of growth and of sun-warmed soil. Where terrain sank to make a wetland, trees walled the water-gleam and more wings than he could count wheeled above. A few roads ran spearshaft-straight, with hardly any movement upon them.

Transmission, towers stood as lonely. They seemed no violation of the landscape. Rather, those soaring, gracefully crowned slendernesses brought to the fore the life around them.

Which, in a fashion, they also guarded, Kenmuir thought. They were integral to the technology and, yes, the social system that kept all this in being. It hadn't been enough that population decline, planta-THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 277

tions genetically engineered for efficiency, and direct synthesis had, between them, emptied many old agricultural regions. To restore a sound ecology—oftener, to create a new one—and then maintain it, that took more than a wish and an economic surplus. It demanded an analysis, a comprehension of the totality, beyond the scope of unaided human brains.

Yes, he thought, the cybercosm was doing a better job of ruling the biosphere than man had. As long as governments heeded its counsel, Earth would stay green.

Counsel? Or command? Was there a difference? You accepted a policy recommendation because it made sense, and presently you found there was no going back, because it had become a basis of too much on which people depended; and so you accepted the next recommendation. But hadn't that always been the case? And purely human politics, short-sighted, ignorant, superstitious, animally impassioned, forever repeated the same ghastly mistakes. Kenmuir had once read a remark of Anson Guthrie's: "Is it freedom when you're in a cage bigger than you want to fly across?"

He shook off his reverie and glanced about him. Three volants were visible afar, and a suborbital went as a rapid spark through heaven. Below him he spied other gleams, machines on their business of ground transport, inspection, tending the country. Trees shaded a small town. How white and peaceful it looked. He supposed the dwellers were all folk who enjoyed surroundings like these.

Those who didn't simply live on their credit probably worked through telepresence, except for local service enterprises. And they had their hobbies, sports, tours, civic affairs, maybe some special ceremonies and observances; and surely, beneath the placid surface, private lives now and then got as tangled and stormy as ever. So, in its own manner, was the community where he grew up.

But on clear nights he would walk out of it and from

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a hilltop yearn toward the stars. How many were they who still did? By what right would Lilisaire deny them a meaning to their lives?

"Damn!" Kenmuir muttered. "You've a real gift for fribbling away time, haven't you, lad?" He'd brooded enough in the Drylander camp after Aleka left and before her flyer arrived for him. If he meant to honor his commitment, and he did, then indecisiveness amounted to betrayal.

After all, the purpose was only to recover information that might well be illegally secreted. If it was important, and if the Federation Council and Assembly possessed it, then everybody who cared to inquire would soon have known too. But nobody did. And democracy, rationality itself weren't possible without adequate data.

He could complain to his legislators or ombud; or he could issue a public statement calling for disclosure, and be shrugged off as a crank. . If the matter came out into the open—As vague as Lilisaire's hopes were, she must be desperate. Certainly she didn't expect it would by itself cause the Habitat project to be cancelled, did she? No, she dreamed of somehow gaining the power to force a termination. But how? An old weapon she could commandeer? Monstrous absurdity.

True, the Lunarians in space, few and scattered though they were, had a rather terrifying military potential. Anybody with ships did. But to rouse them, rally them, get them together in resolution and discipline, before the Peace Authority could stop it—what imaginable revelation might do that?

They were never crusaders. To see Luna overrun by Terrans would sharpen the embitterment of Lunarian spacers, asterites, Martians, satellite colonists, but it wouldn't provoke them to a war they'd almost surely lose. Not even the Lunarians in the Moon would rebel.

Kenmuir had already decided that Lilisaire's quest for the truth had brought her to hints of it that she wasn't sharing.

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Alone in the desert, he had cursed his bond with her. He had sworn to himself that it would not lead him to do anything really harmful. He'd rather live without her than that. By now he might well have resigned, were it not for Aleka. While he scarcely knew the girl, she didn't strike him as a criminal, a fanatic, or a dupe. She had her own cause, whatever it was, but he couldn't believe she'd link it to one she saw as bad. Therefore let him go along at least a little further, through this haze of unknowns.

Briefly, he considered running a data search on her. He had clues to begin on, Hawaiian background, involvement with metamorphs—yes, he recalled something about a unique society in those parts ... But no. Going through regular channels, that could conceivably alert the opposition.

Besides, he needed to know more about his destination. Such an information retrieval would be expected of a visitor, and draw no attention; Bramland was another peculiar place.

Clouds rose over the horizon ahead as he flew. At first they shone like snow, then he was beneath them and the greens had dulled, the sky gone featureless gray. The overcast was predicted to last some days. It wouldn't block everything from monitor satellites, but it would fairly well blind their optics. If the system was scanning the whole planet for him.

Though in that case, he was defying someone or something that could order it to do so—the Federation? He suppressed a shiver. His jaw clamped. If they wanted him to stop, let them enjoin him officially, honestly, by a public announcement over the global net if need be. And let them jolly well explain the reason to him.

Meanwhile, he could do with an explanation from Aleka . .. But start at Bramland.

The volant's terminal screened a short history. Most of it was familiar, sociotechnic cliche.

Various groups, ethnic, cultural, religious, or merely eccentric, strove to keep their identities alive. They seldom refused the basic advantages and services of the 280

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modern world, and in fact its productivity and peace were generally what enabled them to exist; but they turned their backs on its impersonal rationality. Humankind evolved as a tribal creature, and the need to belong to a tribe is almost as strong as sexuality. What price the Fireball Trothdom—? The very Lunarians had their feudalistic allegiances.

The movement toward such partial secession had been particularly marked in North America in the period of upheaval that followed the fall of the Avantists. Among those who found themselves involved were ex-guerrillas of the resistance, assorted nonconformists, and certain outlaws who hoped to gain legitimacy under the new conditions. They pooled their resources and acquired a large tract of land.

The Third Republic did not hinder them. As fragmented as the nation was by that time, it couldn't, aside from requiring observance of environmental regulations. The Bramlanders didn't mind that.

They were seeking a life they could feel was natural. They founded villages, wide-spread over the territory, few of them with a population above 500 adults, a size at which all could participate in public business. In the course of generations, like-minded outsiders joined them while the dissatisfied departed; and thus the culture evolved. There was no dearth of parallel developments.

Evolution, though, takes its own blind courses, and selection working on random mutations and genetic drift can go in curious directions. Today, what vestiges of democracy survived in Bramland were purely ceremonial. It was rituals, taboos, and rankings that satisfied the ordinary member's desire for a well-defined station and purpose in life, a sense of community and of worth. Some men practiced crafts and trades, but incidentally to their real callings—as warriors, sacerdotes, occasional hunters. Women found fulfillment in their mystical sororities and as housewives, sexual artists, occasional mothers. The

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mayor of a town might or might not listen to its elders, but he was its absolute ruler. He had won to that status by challenging and defeating the former incumbent in a set of athletic contests that frequently ended in death. Quarrels with his counterparts led to equally violent "games"

between villages.

Any complaints never got past their authority in any form that would force the North American government to intervene. After all, few of those deaths in duel or war were permanent.

ChillcoflSns were kept handy, and the fallen were rushed to the nearest medical station for revival and repair. Maybe sometimes, Kenmuir thought, it was lesser injuries that took more time and effort—surgery, regeneration, physical therapy.

Besides, whoever didn't like what went on was free to leave. When a society posed no threat to outsiders, meddling in one would set a precedent dangerous to the rest. They shared an interest, and their political influence, in deterring it. The cybercosm never advised otherwise. The bad old days were long past when law restricted voluntary association. The Bramlanders were content, weren't they?

Yes, Kenmuir thought, obviously most of the Bramlanders were. They were riot very intelligent.

Self-selection had seen to that.

So much for background. He summoned recent news of the different settlements. It rarely got on the regular broadcasts—who cared?—but of course the sopnotects that served there passed their observations to the general database.

They reported nothing of special concern. Well, Joetown and Three Comers were at game. A pitched battle had not ended it, and now bands of men hunted each other across the fields and along the riverbanks. No weapons, oh, no, nothing but sport... with well-shaped clubs and staffs, karate chops, winked-at stones . .. Casualties were mounting. Avoid.

He decided on Overburg. Its mayor was at odds with Elville's, but as yet no fights had occurred and an

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agreement might possibly be reached. Besides, Over-burg, larger than average, boasted an inn.

Travel and trade did occur between villages, as well as visits from outside. Kenmuir instructed the volant and felt it change course.

Cultivation appeared. Inhabitants raised, processed, made various things for themselves and to sell. They called it "independence," and perhaps it was— spiritual, another set of rituals. The actual necessities were ferried in, paid for by credit.

"Message," announced the volant. Kenmuir tautened. Into the screen before him sprang a man's face.

He was thin, pale, and stiff-lipped. A headband curled upward in a silvery filigree, a necklace with a pendant hung over his blouse. Badges of office, Kenmuir supposed. "Po't Commissioner f his Pot'ncy Mayor Bruno o' Great Overburg," he identified himself in Anglo of sorts. "Y'r ve'icle signals intent to land. You got clearance?"

"I beg your pardon?" Kenmuir said.

"Clearance. Permission. You don't? Who you, se-fior? What you' business?"

"Since when has a public field demanded a permit? Are you having a problem?"

"You will, if you try. Name y'self an' state y'r business."

Kenmuir checked his temper. Bureaucracy, too, was a way to make people feel important. "No offense, sir. My name is Hannibal, I'm on my way from the west coast, and I'd like to stop here for a day or two. I can't be the first person to come without asking leave beforehand."

"You don't soun' No'merican."

"I'm, uh, European, and—What the Q? May I land or may I not?"

"Awright. You'll have to go befo' the Mayor. Temporary pe'mission granted."

The town was in view. The houses along shaded streets didn't look very different from those Kenmuir had spied earlier, archaic design in modern materials, THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 283

steep-roofed and slab-sided. At the center was a paved square, surrounded by larger buildings.

Kenmuir assumed those were for markets, assemblies, storage, and the like. The biggest, ornately pillared, must be city hall or the mayoral palace or something of that kind. A small airfield, with garages and terminal, lay just beyond the habitations. He set down, took in hand the suitcase Aleka had bought him, and debarked into humid warmth.

The port commissioner awaited him, with four burly men in attendance. In this weather, their garments were loose and gaudy. Long, braided hair trailed below fillets beaded in patterns that presumably signified rank or descent. Each bore a sheath knife and a staff topped with a bronze ball that could fracture a skull. "This way fo' customs 'spection," said the commissioner, and strutted off to the terminal.

It was a standard automated structure, deserted save for his party. He made Kenmuir open his bag and pawed through the contents. They were what Aleka had supplied, a toilet kit and some changes of clothing. Almost reluctantly, he returned it and said, "I phoned. His Pot'ncy's gracious pleased t' receive you right away. Esco't him, Jeb." A slim, graying man, alone and unarmed, didn't need much guarding.

It was a ten or fifteen minute walk to the centrum. Kenmuir's attempt at conversation fell flat.

Jeb was too full of the dignity of his assignment. A few cars passed by, but traffic was mainly pedestrian. Women wore flowing gowns and often carried baskets. Groups of them went chattering together, sometimes with one or two of the few, cherished children. Men likewise stayed with their own sex, or sat on porches drinking and playing games. A number of them were elaborately tattooed, and none seemed to have had scars eliminated. Emblems of pride, then.

Here and there Kenmuir passed a workshop and glimpsed a man making something—an implement, a piece of furniture, a decoration—with no tool more

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complex than a power drill. The style and execution struck him as crude. Yet on the whole, folk appeared happy enough; he saw smiles, heard laughter and animated talk. What words reached him concerned gossip, weather, crops, fishing, the iniquity of Elville, "yump . .. sho' right.. . haw

. . ." He thought that if he had to stay here any length of time, he'd hope for a miniwar to enlist in before he went berserk from boredom.

The palace columns represented ferocious monsters. Two sentries flanked the entrance. "Now you be real respec'ful," Jeb warned. "Bend yo' knee."

A chamber stretched broad and long. Kenmuir made out painted shields on the walls and banners hung from the crossbeams. A strip of crimson carpet led to a dais at the far end. There, on a canopied throne, sat Bruno, mayor of Overburg, Four young women, thinly and luxuriously clad, displayed themselves on cushions at either side. Six warriors stood guard. Pages waited for orders. Half a dozen older men were also present; Kenmuir wasn't sure whether they were councillors, courtiers, petitioners, or social callers. He advanced with his escort through silence and stares.

Jeb halted a meter from the dais. Kenmuir did too. Jeb snapped a salute, palm to brow, and announced, "The stranger, senorissimo." Kenmuir remembered to genuflect, awkwardly.

"Ah, yuh," rumbled the mayor. "Yo* name an*

pu'pose."

He was a huge man, massively muscular. A blond mane dropped past prognathous features, where a beard bristled, apparently unique in this place. A sign of office, like the horned headband and gold chain? A greasy shirt gaped open around the shaggy breast. The knife sheathed against his trews was outsize. His feet were bare and unwashed. In his right hand he clutched a wooden goblet.

"Hannibal, sir," Kenmuir replied. He and Aleka had agreed on the alias. It gave ho clue to his identity,

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while being distinctive enough for her to be certain of the message he would put in the public bulletin base, informing her of his whereabouts, as soon as he could after learning what they would be.

"Hannibal, huh? Not Cannibal?" Bruno guffawed. Men and boys dutifully laughed." The women giggled.

Kenmuir thought that two of them forced it, and that the looks they gave the mayor were frightened. The others were perhaps content with their status.

Bruno hunched forward. "Why you here? Spy? Gummint agent? Hah?" He sat back again, expectant, and glugged from his goblet.

He couldn't do worse than expel the newcomer. Could he? Maybe. Anyhow, that would be an infernal nuisance. "I assure you, sir," Kenmuir sighed, "I'm a harmless private person. A friend and I are going to spend a while in Lake Superior Preserve. At the last minute, she was delayed. I've heard interesting things about your community, and would like to take a day or two here till she can meet me." Curious outsiders must come occasionally, if not often. "You see, I deal in uniques, handmade work, and I gather you have skilled craftsmen." When was flattery ever unwelcome, or money?

Bruno raised his brows. " *She,' d'you say?"

"Well, yes, a young lady," Kenmuir replied, hanging onto his patience. Somebody sniggered. "Could I arrange permission for her to land and look around too?" Somewhere along the orbit, he and Aleka must have a serious talk. This might be their last chance before jumping off into the irrevocable.

"Young. Hum. Yuh." Bruno pondered. Kenmuir thought of slow wheels turning. "Yuh. Awright, You see the health oflPcer, it clears you, awright, you can stay. At the inn." Spend money.

The interview hadn't been too bad. No big surprise. Kenmuir was clearly not from hated Elville.

Bruno leered. "Landing tax. Near forgot. Landing tax. Ten, uh, fifteen ucus. Apiece. You can pay it f*r you both. To me."

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Extortion, but Kenmuir decided not to invoke the law. "Do you object to cash, sir?" If he debited his account, that was a giveaway to any search program.

"Cash? Huh? Naw, naw, cash's fine." Bruno's manner suggested it was better than fine. Perhaps he had transactions of his own that he didn't want traced. He accepted the bills and counted them twice, moving his lips. "Awright, guardsman, take'm to the health offcer, and when he's cleared, show'm to the inn." Half cordially: "Maybe we'll talk later, Hannibal. Maybe I'll 'vite you Pr a drink. Yuh, maybe even—" He nodded and winked, right and left, at his women. Two of them smiled.

Jeb saluted and led Kenmuir back out. "This way," he directed." 'Cross the square. The clinic there, see?"

Understanding smote. "The health officer" hadn't registered a meaning, unless as a vague idea of still another tribal functionary. But Bruno had said "it." Yonder waited a sophotect Kenmuir stumbled. He had almost dug in his heels. Jeb gave him a Questioning glance. No. He must go through with this. Suddenly to return to his volant and take off, that would cause wondering.

"Excuse me," he muttered and strode on.

Why did Bruno want the machine to approve him? Omciousness? The mayor, like the port commissioner, didn't get many chances to throw his weight around in the presence of strangers. Or was Bruno anxious to stay on the good side of the government, leaning backward to look cooperative? He might fear that sometime, policy or no, there would be a crackdown on local practices.

No matter now. What Kenmuir must do was pass himself off as what he claimed to be. He swallowed, cleared his throat, and told the muscles in his back to slack off.

Outwardly the clinic resembled its neighbors. The reception room was reassuringly if rather hideously decorated with Bramlander art. Behind it, Kenmuir knew, was up-to-date equipment for treating most

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hurts and ills. Likewise was what the sophotect used to monitor sanitation, automated services such as energy, and the biological well-being of the land around. The town of his childhood, also isolated, had had just such an attendant. People there had called it the caretaker, when they didn't say "Auld Angus."

The form here was hauntingly similar, boxy, four-legged, six-armed, with turret for sensors and elec-trophotonic brain, housing for powerpack, and retractable communications dish. The voice was' male, deep and resonant: "Hi, how c'n I help you?"

"Got this guzzah wants 'a stay a couple days," Jeb explained. "Mayor wants you awright him."

"Ah." The accent became educated. "Bienvenido, senor. For favor, be seated. A formality, I'm sure.

Everybody's tense, what with this unfortunate friction with Elville. My opposite number there and I are trying to get it composed, but—" The flexible pair of arms rippled through a shrug. "Jeb, you can go."

"Not need me?"

"Certainly not. You may go, I said." The tone had sharpened the least bit. Jeb bent his head, perhaps unconsciously, and left.

"Do take a seat," the sophotect urged. "I suspect you've had a slightly unpleasant time. Would you care for coffee, tea, or a short whisky?"

Kenmuir took a chair. His body resisted its form-fitting embrace, but he kept his face steady.

"No, thank you, I'm on trajectory, really I am."

The machine seized on the expression. "Ah, are you concerned with space? How interesting. You'd be our first visitor who wasn't of this Earth earthy." A chuckle ran forth.

Kenmuir swore at himself. "No, I, I have a friend in the Service, and I've gone once to the Moon.

That's all." He retailed his story and waited belly-painful. That he chose to go by a name like Hannibal was nothing unusual, it could be whim, but what if the officer asked him for his registry number?

That still might not be fatal, he thought beneath the

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thunders. For the time being, this was a distinct, separated personality that stood before him. It could not have received any reason to be suspicious. (Unless the cybercosm had contacted every last unit on the planet. . . but that kind of effort, at the present stage of things, was unlikely. The channels and the data-processing capabilities that would be tied up—) It might not call in to query whether the man thus identified was wanted for anything. After all, if it did, that would entail a global data search to determine whether the number he gave was false.

"I see," the sophotect said quietly. "Bueno, let me repeat, bienvenido. Or, in your idiom, welcome. I hope you and your friend to come will enjoy your stay."

The voice was warm. Could the wish be sincere? Why not? Kenmuir harked back. Auld Angus, comforting him when he was small and had broken a rib, telling him a fable and singing him a song

.. . Auld Angus, counselor, arbiter of quarrels, patiently listening to a boy who was one-sidedly in love ... Auld Angus, courteous as he told the town council that it must enforce limits on mussel gathering if it didn't want the government to station a patrol at the bay ... Auld Angus, advising a youth that he indeed seemed to have the potential of becoming a space pilot, and he should go for it... .

Did they give their sophotect in Overburg a name and their affection?

Kenmuir stirred. "I'll be on my way, then," he said.

The officer raised a humanlike hand. "A moment, por favor. I would like to caution you. This is a difficult society. The conflict between chiefs has not improved matters. Have a care, always.

Especially after your friend arrives. You've indicated she's female. I get the impression she's attractive. Best she* stay inconspicuous, and no longer than she must. Do you follow me?"

"I... think so," Kenmuir answered.

Mostly he was thinking how well the machine had

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read him. But why shouldn't it? If the glands weren't there, an equivalent was, conation, intuition, together with an intellect probably superior to his.

Certainly superior, if you understood that this was an avatar of the cybercosm,'merging itself again and again with the whole, sometimes reshaped thereby, always bearing back memories of that gigantic oneness, even an intimation of the Teramind. Of course it interpreted his overtones, body language, things left unsaid: and not without what you might as well call empathy, or actual sympathy. It, Auld Angus, every electrophotonic intelligence—and, yes, the humble unconscious robots—were all waves on the same ocean.