They ease into paths around the Earth-Moon system. Such orbits are unstable, and from time to time thrust corrects them.

"They must vacate," Janvier states. His image in the screen is haggard, sweat beading cheeks and brow. "Froni where they are, they could accelerate inward, open their hatches, and shovel rocks at meteor speed down on our cities,"

Transmission tag.

"Don't force the issue yet," Dagny advises. "It would be a crazy thing for them to do, you know.

Most of the stuff would bum up in the atmosphere. What little reached the surface would be gravel size, and trajectory control impossible. Everything would likeliest fall in the ocean or onto empty fields."

—"That is if it is ordinary stuff, ore, ingots, dust, ice. How do we know they haven't forged massive, aerodynamic missiles out there?"

—"It would still be insane. Whenever Earth wants to make an all-out effort, it can crush Luna utterly. Killing millions of people would reliably provoke that. I assure you, the Selenarchs are not loco."

—"I suppose so, although sometimes I wonder. But I have to deal with the public reaction. When the news is released, and that is inevitable soon, any 'cast will show you what it is like. I beg you, convince those arrogant barons and tycoons they have miscalculated."

—"I am not certain they have, senor. I am certain that the politicians of Earth miscalculated gravely. Let us try together, from our different sides, for emotional damage control."

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Janvier invokes emergency powers granted under the Covenant and commands the Lunarian ships to go.

They make no reply. The Trust declares that the order has no legal force, because simply adopting an unusual orbit poses no threat, nor has one been spoken.

Lunarians in the cities occasionally set aside their dignity and leer at passing Earthfolk. The air well-nigh smells of oncoming lightning.

The Federation and its member governments keep no spacecraft capable of attack. Indeed, they have scant space transport of any sort. Normally they have contracted with Fireball, thereby sparing themselves both the capital cost and the expensive, cumbersome bureaucracies they would have been sure to establish.

Fireball declines to move against the Lunarian vessels. What, a private company undertaking paramilitary operations? It would be a violation of the Covenant. For that matter, Anson Guthrie announces, Fireball will not provide the extra bottom needed for lifting more troops to the Moon.

He holds that the move would be disastrously unwise, and his organization cannot in conscience support it.

In Hiroshima the speaker for Ecuador, where Fireball is incorporated, explains that her government concurs with Sr. Guthrie and will not compel him. She strongly urges giving the Lunarians their self-determination, and introduces a motion to that effect.

However, Fireball and Ecuador will not tolerate bombardment of Earth. Should such happen, every resource will be made available for pacification of the Moon and punishment of the criminals.

Meanwhile, they offer their good offices toward mediating the dispute.

Lars Rydberg goes to Luna as Fireball's plenipotentiary.

His public statements are few and curt. For the most part he is alone with the download. This is natural and somewhat reassuring. Day by day, the terror on Earth ebbs.

500

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The Assembly reopens the independence question. Speeches are shorter and more to the point than before. Divisions are becoming clear-cut. On the one side, the. advocates of releasing Luna have gained recruits among their colleagues and in their constituencies. If the alternative amounts to war, it is unacceptable. The Lunarians have the right to be what they are, and as their unique civilization flowers, ours will share in its achievements. On the other side, the heritage persuasion has hardened and has also made converts. Furthermore, it is argued, nationalism wrought multimillions of deaths, over and over, with devastation from which the world has never quite recovered. Here we see the monster hatching anew. We must crush its head while we still can.

The news explodes: Selenarchs have dispatched units of their retainers to occupy powerbeam stations "and protect them for the duration of the present exigency." The squadrons are well-organized and formidably equipped—with small arms, as the Covenant allows if you strain an interpretation, but equal to anything that the Peace Authority force on the Moon can bring against them. Besides, although the Selenarchs are noncommittal about it, rumors fly of heavier weapons. A catapult, easily and cheaply made, can throw a missile halfway around the Moon.

Be that as it may, a transmission unit would scarcely survive a battle for possession of it.

—Janvier: "This is rebellion. Fireball promised help in case of outright violence."

—Rydberg: "Sir, fam not a lawyer. I cannot judge the legality of the action. According to the Provisional Trust, it is justified under the law of dire necessity. Think how dependent Earth is on the solar energy from Luna."

—Janvier: "Oh, yes. They suppose they have us by the. throat. I say this is as suicidal a threat as those ships pose, but a great many human beings would die, and I call on Fireball to do its duty."

—Rydberg: "Sir, we could take out the ships, at

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 501

enormous cost, but how can we handle the situation on the ground? Let me repeat, Lord Brandir and his associates do not make it a threat. They do not want cities darkened, services halted, panic and crime and death over Earth. No, they will guard those stations from sabotage by extremists here on the Moon."

—Janvier: "What of the sites they have not occupied?"

—Rydberg: "True, they can watch only a few. They consider it an object lesson."

—Janvier: "Hm. I say again, they are trying to take us by the throat."

—Rydberg: "And / say, with respect, they are demonstrating what could, what would happen on a world of wild individualists who felt they were under a foreign tyranny... . Please, I am not on their side myself, I am simply telling you what they believe. . . . Can the Peace Authority secure the network? Yes, if first you commit genocide on the Lunarians. Otherwise you must guard the whole of it, at unbearable expense, and the guard will keep failing, because they are Terrans, not Lunarians, and as for robots, humans can always find ways to outwit them."

—"Whereas the Selenarchs, if they rule the Moon, can effectively maintain the system?"

—"Yes, Mr. President. They have the organization and the loyal, able followers. They will not have the revolutionary saboteurs."

—"Are you certain?" •

—"Nothing is certain forever. I am speaking of today, our children's lifetimes, and I hope our grandchildren's. By then, Earth may no longer need power from Luna."

—"But meanwhile the Selenarchs can blackmail us."

—"Consider their psychology, sir. Those utilities enjoy huge earnings. Why jeopardize that?

Lunarians are not interested in dominion over . .. our kind of humans."

—"Then what games do they mean to play?"

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—"That I cannot tell you. I wonder if they can, themselves. The future will show. I only say, this game is played out and you should concede."

Undetectable in circuit, Dagny has followed the conversation. It is her wont.

Whipsaw, from a degree of relief about a firestorm from space to a dread of global energy famine.

The peoples of Earth and their leaders are alike exhausted. It is easiest to accept the assurances, override the remaining opposition, and yield. After all, the positive inducements are substantial.

The measure comes to the floor. It passes. The Council ratifies, the president signs. Once the stipulated compensatory arrangements have been made, Luna shall be free and sovereign.

Baronial men leave the transmitters. The circling ships enter Lunar orbit and discharge cargoes that turn out to be quite commonplace. As part of the accord, these craft will soon be in Terrestrial hands.

No gatherings jubilate. On Earth, the mood is mostly a dull thankfulness that the confrontation is past. Lunarians are not given to mass histrionics. Terran Moondwellers who feel happy with the outcome celebrate apart. As for those who do not, they begin preparing to emigrate.

Alone, Dagny and Rydberg speak. She wears a bipedal robot body. Weary to the depths of her spirit, if downloads have any, she will not simulate the image of the dead woman; but neither will she be a mere voice.

"It worked," she sighs: for she has mastered the making of human sounds. "Between the Trust, Fireball, Brandir and his fellows, the space captains—"

"Do not forget yourself," he says.

The faceless head shakes. "No, nor those I haven't named. You know who they were. Never mind. What we set up and played through, the whole charade, it worked. I honestly doubted it would. But what else was there to try?"

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 503

His tone goes metallic. "If it had failed, it would have stopped being a charade."

"Yes. Janvier realized that. Do you realize that he did? It succeeded because reality stood behind it."

"And it was simpler than what's ahead of us."

"You'll navigate, I'm sure."

He gives her a long look, as if it were into living eyes. "We will?"

"Luna, Earth, Fireball, everybody."

"Except you?"

"I've been useful—"

"What a poor word,. .. Mother!"

A robot cannot weep. "I kept her promise for her. Now let me go."

"Do you want to die?" he whispers.

She forms a laugh. "What the hell does that question mean, for me?"

He must take a moment before he can say it. "Do you want your program wiped? Made nothing?"

"Your mother set that condition before she agreed to be downloaded. I hold you to it."

"Anson Guthrie goes on."

"He is he. I am I." Oh, Dagny Beynac loved life, but to her, being an abstraction was not life.

Nor does the revenant care to evolve into something else, alien to her Edmond.

"The time could come—very likely will come— when they have need of you again."

"No. They should never think they need one person that much."

Her gaze captures his and holds it. Beneath his thin white hair is a countenance gone well-nigh skeletal. He is near the century mark himself. Yet he was born to a girl named Dagny Ebbesen.

After a long time, he slumps back in his chair and says unevenly, "The, the termination will be a big event, you know."

If she were making an image, it would have smiled. "I'm afraid so. See it through."

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"I already hear talk about it. The same tomb for you—"

"Why not, if they wish?"

A gesture, a symbol, a final service rendered. This hardware and the blanked software may as well rest there as anyplace else. The site may even become a halidom, like Thermopylae or Bodhgaya, around which hearts can irrationally rally. Besides, she likes the thought that that which was her will lie beside the ash that was Dagny Beynac beneath the stars that shone on 'Mond.

41

Fog rolled in during the night. By sunrise it had cloaked Guthrie House in a gray-white where the closest trees, two or three meters from a window, were shadows and everything else was formless.

Air lay cold and damp and very quiet. You could just hear the hush of waves along the shore and perhaps a dripping from the eaves.

At breakfast Matthias, Kenmuir, and Aleka exchanged no more than muttered greetings, for it was plain to see that the lodgemaster wanted silence. But when the last cup of coffee had been drained, he rose and growled, "Follow me." The others went after his bulk, out into the hall, up the stairs, down another hall to a certain door which he opened, and through. He closed it behind them.

"I believe it's right we talk here," he said.

Kenmuir and Aleka glanced about. Unlighted save for what seeped through the fog from a hidden sun, the room would have been dim were its walls and ceiling not so white. A few ancient pictures decorated it, family scenes, landscapes, a view of Earth from orbit. Drapes hung at the tall windows. The floor was bare hardwood. Furniture was sparse and likewise THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 505

from early times, four chairs, a dresser, a cabinet, a bed. In one corner stood a man-high mechanical clock. Its pendulum swung slowly and somehow inexorably; the ticking seemed loud in this stillness.

A chill ran through Kenmuir. The hair stood up on his arms. He knew where he was.

"For privacy?" Aleka was asking.

"No," Matthias replied. "I told you, the estate is spyproof and everybody on it is a sworn consorte. But here is where mortal Anson Guthrie died."

Her eyes grew large. She made a sign that Kenmuir did not recognize.

Then she looked more closely at Matthias, stooped shoulders, lines graven'deeper than before in a face where the nose stood forth like a mountain ridge, and murmured, "You really didn't sleep much, did you?"

"There'll be time for that later," he said. "All the time in the universe."

Heavily, he sat down and gestured his visitors to do so. They put their chairs side by side.

Aleka's hand found Kenmuir's. What comfort flowed from hers into his!

Matthias raised his head. "But we haven't much of it just now," he warned. "The hunters don't know you're here. If they did, we'd be under arrest already. They're searching, though, and surveying, and thinking. Before long, Venator or a squad of his will return. Meanwhile, if you leave in any ordinary way, you'll surely be sported. Disguises won't help. They'll stop everyone for a close look."

The eeriness tingled again down Kenmuir's spine. "There's a way that's not ordinary?"

"You'll help us, senor?" Aleka joined in.

Matthias nodded. "What little I can. Or, rather, I'll hope to help the cause of freedom."

"You decided this last night?" Kenmuir asked, and realized at once how stupid the question was.

Matthias's voice marched on, toneless but clock-steady. "It wasn't jsasy. Til be breaking a promise as old as the Trothdom and as strong as any I ever gave.

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And it may be for nothing, or it may be for the worse. Why are they so determined to keep Proserpina from us? I should think if the Lunarians got knowledge of it, access to it, they wouldn't oppose the Habitat—at least, not with force enough to matter. And the Habitat is our way to the stars." He breathed for a moment. "Or is it? I don't know, I don't know."

Aleka heard the pain. She released Kenmuir's hand and reached over to grasp his.

He closed the great knobbly paw about hers and held it for two or three heartbeats before he let go. A smile ghosted briefly over his lips^ "Gracias, querida," he signed. "I did think about you too, and your people."

Resonantly: "And I thought over and over how high-handed, how unlawful Venator's gang is being. If the Federation government can do this to us, concealing a fact that would change thousands of lives, maybe change the course of history, what else is it doing? What will it do next? Guthrie used to quote a proverb about not letting the camel's nose into your tent. I think more than its nose is in. Bloody near the whole camel is. Or soon will be, if we sit meek."

"Could they have a decent reason for the secrecy?" she asked low.

Kenmuir spoke. Anger had been crystallizing in him too, sharp and cold. "At best, they aren't even offering that much of an excuse. They're treating us like children."

"Children of the cybercosm," Matthias agreed. "Or wards, or pets, or domestic animals."

Trouble trembled in Aleka's face and words. "Most people feel free and happy."

"Most dogs do," Matthias said.

"I'm not against you, senor. I just can't help wondering—the larger good, also for my people—"

"Either we act or we don't," Kenmuir snapped.

"Yes." She straightened. "Bueno, let's act, then, and take the responsibility for whatever comes of it, like—like free adult humans."

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Kenmuir decided he should utter another question whose answer he was almost sure of, if only to get it out of the way. "Could we simply broadcast what we know? I suppose Guthrie House has the equipment. It's got plenty of every other kind I can think of."

"I considered that," Matthias admitted. "No. It wouldn't be any real use. I've lived on Earth and dealt with the powers that be long enough to have learned what works, and how, and what doesn't work. A bare statement like that—too easily denied, and guided down the public memory hole.

Meanwhile Venator and his merry men would have seized us. They might all too well pick up clues to Fireball's secret, and go blot it out."

Kenmuir's fists clenched. Aleka half sprang to her feet, sank back down, and whispered, "lan's told me about—the Founder's Word?"

"Yes." The Rydberg's voice tolled. "It came to me near the end of this night what I must do. Then I could sleep for a bit. It's right that this be where."

The sanctuary, the shrine, Kenmuir thought.

The hands of the clock reached XII and VII. It boomed forth the hour. A breeze outside made the fog swirl at the windows like smoke.

"Not that the knowledge will necessarily save you," Matthias went on. "Odds are that it won't. If you think the gamble is sheerly loco, I swear you never to speak of this again, not even between yourselves, not ever again."

"I swear," Aleka said as if it were a prayer.

"By my troth," Kenmuir declared.

"And yet the story is the story of a vow that was broken," Matthias said.

They waited.

After a minute had ticked away, he continued: "Lars Rydberg promised his mother Dagny Beynac that if she'd download, then when the downlead's work was done he'd wipe its program and give it oblivion. The download itself asked him to, and again he promised."

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"But he didn't?" Aleka breathed while Kenmuir's pulse stumbled.

"No. When at last he'd turned the network off and stood alone with it, there where they'd .said goodbye —he'd kissed the hard box between its optic stalks— he thought about what it, no, she had done. How she'd piloted Luna and, yes, Earth through the revolution, how without her it could easily have become catastrophe, how precarious the situation still was and how sorely she might be needed. To her, switchoff was the same as wipeout, unless she was reactivated. He told the world he'd done what he said he would, and he brought her to Dagny's tomb to rest by Dagny's ashes, and with everything he was he hoped it could be forever. But he bore the burden of this to his grave."

"He shared it with a son of his," Aleka knew.

"Yes. In case, just in case. And so onward through time."

"She never was called back," Aleka concluded. "The secret became a Fireball tradition, no more.

Going to Luna and redeeming Lars's promise, that must have appeared to later Rydbergs like breaching their own."

"Till now."

"Raising her—" Kenmuir croaked out of a dry throat.

"She, alive, certainly knew about Proserpina," Matthias said. "She must have heard or seen written down what its orbital elements are. She probably remembered them—always had a strong memory, the biographies tell—and therefore her download did too. Anyhow, closely enough that any astronomer or spacefarer could easily find it. Once that information is out, the hoarding of the truth is finished."

For whatever value it might have to Lilisaire, Kenmuir thought. But never mind. He was committed, as much to Aleka and her cause as to anyone or anything else, including an end to his own outlawry. "You'll send an agent?" he asked.

Matthias didn't seem to have heard him, but pro-

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 509

ceeded: "This may be quite useless, understand. The download has lain there for centuries. The tomb won't have screened out all the cosmic radiation, and there's the inherent background too.

Mutilated chips, scrambled electronics, cumulative damage never repaired. By now, maybe nothing that will function is left."

"Or maybe a dement—" Horror wrenched out of Aleka. "Oh, no!"

"Maybe not," Kenmuir reassured her. "In fact, from what I know of such things, I'd guess the chances are good that the system's still in working order." He spoke with more confidence than he felt.

Aleka grimaced. "Don't call her a system."

"I'm prepared to have you try, and shoulder my share of whatever guilt will follow," Matthias said. "Are you?"

It thrilled in Kenmuir. "Yes."

Aleka blinked back tears. "Yes."

"But your idea of sending an agent—No, I'm afraid not," Matthias said.

"Why?" Kenmuir inquired.

"Think." Matthias had had the night, alone, in which to do so. "None of the staff here are qualified. I'd have to call someone in, and brief him not only on the mission but on the technical details. That's an antique machine, don't forget. Nothing like it is in use today. And he'd need equipment. Now we can be certain Guthrie House is under remote but high-resolution robotic surveillance, at the minimum. Do you imagine anybody could leave here with a mess of gear, take passage for Luna, and go out to Dagny's tomb—isolated, the holiest ground on the Moon— without Venator knowing? And acting?"

"And ... wiping the program," Aleka said.

"And coming here for us," Kenmuir. added. "But, um, couldn't the man simply tell Lilisaire in her castle? She might be able to do something. If not enter the tomb, then instigate a search for Proserpina."

"In due course, ifall else fails, that can be tried," Matthias said without enthusiasm. "I'll arrange for an

510

POUL ANDERSON

encrypted message to a trustworthy man, with instructions to decrypt it and convey it after a given length of time, when perhaps Venator's corps is less vigilant. But I'd not be hopeful. If they haven't found a pretext to arrest her, which I expect they will have, she'll at least stay under close watch. Remember, they know that you know the asteroid exists. Could she or any of her kind mount a search, astronomical or in spacecraft, even by Lunarians in the outer System, without Venator guessing what they were about and moving to stop them? I doubt it."

"And meanwhile we'll have failed, and be done for." Once more Kenmuir had a sense of fingers closing on him.

Aleka struck them aside. "But you have a way, senor. You must, or you wouldn't have spoken."

"Yes," Matthias answered, and abruptly his voice sounded almost young. "A mad way, a wild hunt, but it might work, it barely might work."

Understanding flashed into Kenmuir. "Kestrel!" he yelled.

Aleka stared at him, "What?"

He could not stay seated, he leaped up and paced, to and fro, arousal going through him in surges like the sea waves out beyond the mists. "The spacecraft, the relic, Kyra Davis's ship. We keep it always ready to lift—"

She gasped.

Matthias's tones quickened: "Including spacesuits, modern self-adjusting ones, EV\ drive packs, and everything else." Otherwise the symbolism would have been hollow. Suddenly Kenmuir realized, fully, why the Trothdom had fought, and paid a high price in things yielded during negotiations, for the right to maintain an antimatter-powered vessel on Earth. Kestrel was not the first sacred object in human history. Of course, any launch was forbidden. He heard through his blood: "A short flight, if you can pilot her, Captain Kenmuir."

"I can study it up," he said, faintly amazed at the THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 511

levelness of his voice. "You have vivifer material about that model, so we won't have to tap the public database, don't you?"

"But the whole world will see!" Aleka exclaimed.

Matthias grinned. "Right. Something that spectacular can't be kept entirely off the news, and the Teramind itself will be hard put to explain it away."

Sobriety slid into Kenmuir's passion. "Unless Venator's service heads me off in time."

"They have craft with far greater capabilities, true, and they'll react fast," Matthias said. "But you'll take them by surprise, and they won't know where you're. bound till you've landed. Then you'll have to be quick, oh, yes."

In for a penny, in for a pound. Kenmuir laughed aloud. "We'll plan the operation. You can get data on what Authority units are currently stationed where or in which orbits, can't you? That's public information. And I've got an idea about how ta. keep them from silencing me once they've caught me. Come, let's get busy!" <

" 'Auwe no ho'i e," Aleka murmured. "You surprise me, you do. I didn't expect I'd ever see you in a state like this."

"I've work ahead of me," was all Kemnuir could find to say.

She rose and regarded him closely. "One thing, ami go. What's this T? You're not going alone." '

His pacing jarred to a halt. "What? You? Untrained and—and vulnerable—No, ridiculous."

"I'm a quick study," Aleka said. "I can learn_what I'll need to be of some help." She addressed Matthias. "Can't I, senor?"

The Rydberg smiled. "I believe you had better have a partner, Captain Kenmuir. I'm too decrepit.

This lass strikes me as being potentially the most competent person we have on hand."

"Besides," Aleka told them, "it's my mission too. And, and, Pele's teeth, lan, I won't let you go without me!"

42

Ijod speed you." The ancient words seemed to follow Kenmuir and Aleka out of Guthrie House.

Matthias did not, nor anyone else. Alone, they crossed the lawn toward the forest.

Light streamed from a sun close to the sea. It set grass and the massed needles of trees aglow.

The Moon stood in deepening blue nearly as high as it was going to mount. Though the day's mildness lingered, Kenmuir pulled his hooded cloak tighter about him. He would have wished for clouds to veil this freehold a little from the seeing, unseen orbiting robots.

But for the quickest passage today, launch must be now; and to wait would be to run a worse risk.

Into the past fifty-odd hours, less a few for sleep, had been crammed as much preparation as was possible, study, simulation practice, planning. What was to come of it, that could never be foreseeable.

Beneath the alertness that took hold of him in any crisis, tension pulsed and shivered. The rugged bark of a fir, its fragrance, the scuff of his feet on duff, its crackly yielding to his weight, were vivid as lightning. More than biochemical stimulant upbore him. He was bound on a mission, perhaps his last but surely his greatest.

Silent, he and Aleka passed along the trail through the woods and out into the clearing. Shadow brimmed it. Light burned yet on treetops around and on the prow of the spaceship. Poised within the clear cylindrical shelter, she thrust her torpedo shape aloft to outshine the Moon.

A stone wall guarded the shrine. In front of its entryway, a two-meter block held a bronze tablet bearing an account of what Kyra Davis had done.

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Here Fireball folk always paused, as at an altar. Kenmuir and Aleka gave salute.

Sometimes those who came went on into the ship, for special rites or just to service her. Several had done it of late. They too had worn cloaks, in their case to hide the equipment and rations they took aboard. The hope was that this would touch off no alarm in the surveillance machines—another ceremony, another assertion of an identity long since obsolete. Leading the way onward, Kenmuir took care to pace slowly.

A mechanism permanently activated detected his approach and extruded a ramp from beneath the aft personnel lock, which opened. Man and woman ascended. For a bare instant, they glanced about at the living forest and took a breath. Then they went inside. The valve shut, the ramp retracted.

Beyond the chamber, Kenmuir doffed his cloak. To stow it in a locker was sheer reflex; he noticed and grinned at himself. Aleka did likewise. They were both clad in skinsuits, to slip directly into space outfits. Even now, the sight of her caught at him. "Come along," he said hastily.

When the ship rested on her landing jacks, passageways through the length of her became vertical shafts. You used fixed ladders. The climb between pearl-gray bulkheads went past sections where remembrances of the original pilot darted forth, stowed high-acceleration couches, door to the wash cubicle, folded galley manifold, closet for personal possessions, multiceiver with vivifer, hobby kit, a family picture faded to a blur.. . Air hung heavy. It would not freshen until the recycler and ventilators resumed work.

To him the command cabin was archaic, a bit of history, to her new and foreign, but in the simulator both had grown familiar with it. They took their seats before the control console and secured their harnesses. Viewscreens and displays were blank, meters dead. Kenmuir sought after words. Aleka's smile flashed taut. "Go," she said to him. "Go for broke."

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POUL ANDERSON

His fingers moved across the board. Lights glowed, needles quivered, numbers and graphics appeared, the forward viewscreen filled with sky. A rustle of air reached him, as if somewhere lungs were stirring. His voice sounded unnaturally loud. "Full readiness. Immediate liftoff."

The voice from the speaker was female, husky, Kyra Davis's own. So had she wanted it. "Salud. . ..

It's been a long time.. . . You are strangers." His glance flipped involuntarily to the scanners whereby Kestrel observed him. The voice firmed. "We have no clearance."

Part of the study had been of the language as it was spoken in that era. Kenmuir tried to form a pronunciation close enough for the robot to understand. "Emergency."

Sensors were sweeping around. "No spacefield here. Liftoff in surroundings like these is unlawful.

And I am enclosed."

Hard to grasp that this was no sophotect, merely a robot, without conscious mind or independent will. He knew not how many such he had dealt with in his life, but here was something different.

Here was a machine that had flown with Kyra Davis, served her, conversed and played games with her, maybe listened to her secret confessions and heard her weep. More than database entries remained. Against all reason, to Kenmuir, a spirit haunted the ship.

He had not expected it would hurt to key the Override code.

He did.

The orders jerked out of him: "We're bound for the Moon. The shell is hyalon, tough, but you can break through if you boost at ten g. Then reduce to two g and proceed. However, don't make directly for Luna. Set a course that will skim us past it, as if to get a gravity boost for a destination—'* He gave coordinates, arbitrarily chosen, that would point them to deep space, well off the ecliptic. "In about an hour I'll

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tell you the maneuver we actually want, and you can figure your deceleration vectors accordingly."

He didn't care to do it earlier because he didn't know what would happen. By then the whole plan might have crashed.

"Confirming." Displays repeated the instructions. They gathered detail as computation sped by. "I warn you, this is dangerous. I'm streamlined for getting around on the likes of Mars or Titan, not Earth. Maybe the laws of astronautics changed while I was asleep, but, hombre, the laws of physics can't have."

If only she didn't sound so human, so alive.

Aleka stroked the console. "You'll swing it, kestrel," she said. "You did a lot more for Kyra."

"Gracias," replied the voice, as warm as hers. Briskly: "Liftoff in sixty seconds."

Kenmuir and Aleka spent them looking into one another's eyes.

Thunder boomed through their bones. Weight crammed them back. Darkness swooped in.

It retreated. Kenmuir drew a gasp. Acceleration had dropped to twice normal. His gaze roved the view-screens. Aft, beneath, fire crowned the trees around the blackened clearing. Well, the ecological service would soon quench it. Forward, heaven was purpling toward night.

The hull pierced most of Earth's atmosphere while he sat half-conscious. The last vibrations ebbed away, the sky went black, stars came forth. The only noises he heard were his breath and thudding blood. No sound rose from the engine. A plasma drive was too efficient, out here where it belonged.

Aleka stared ahead, hugged herself, and whispered, "We're on the loose. We really are."

"For the moment," Kenmuir mumbled.

•She nodded. "Traffic Control around the world must be like a hornets' nest kicked over. Why aren't they calling us?"

"This ship isn't integrated with the system," he 516

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reminded her. Too many facts to learn in too short a time. Some would not come at once when summoned. Which was he forgetting? "They'll have to find the appropriate band, and then I suppose they'll assign a sentience to their end."

In the after screens Earth's horizon was a huge sapphire arc. It contracted ever faster. Soon the planet would lie whole within the frames. Slowing at an equal rate after turnover, Kestrel would reach Luna inside three hours. Their bodies in good condition and nanochemically reinforced, her riders could well endure doubled weight that long and arrive fit for action.

If they did.

"Direct a laser communication to Luna," Kenmuir said, and specified the coordinates.

"Zamok Vysoki," responded the ship. "I remember. ... Ready."

"lan Kenmuir to the lady Lilisaire," he intoned. A part of him wanted to say, "Well done" to Kestrel which kept the beam aimed and Doppler-compen-sated throughout her furiously mounting velocity. "I am bound for deep space on your service. TrafCon objects. Get the data on their movements before they clamp down secrecy. If you can, obstruct pursuit and intervention, but please don't endanger anyone. Out."

He didn't know whether the message was received. Perhaps the facilities at the castle were jammed or otherwise disabled by the opposition. Certainly surveillance heard everything; and he had no encrypting capabilities. Mention of Proserpina would likely have provoked immediate, radical counteraction. Besides, it was a bargaining counter to hold in reserve—an ace in the hole, Aleka had said, thinking of some obscure game. The purpose of Kenmuir's call was mainly to further his deception. Make the hunters concentrate their strength and build up their velocities on a trail that he would suddenly leave. Then he might for a brief spell be free to enter Dagny's tomb.

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A light blinked red. "Communication from Earth," the ship told them. "It claims absolute priority."

"Make contact," Kenmuir ordered.

No image appeared. The videos weren't compatible. He knew the voice, however. Once Matthias realized what kind of agent was visiting him, he had surreptitiously had a man of his record whatever was feasible. He played the recording for these two as part of their briefing.

"Spaceship Kestrel, null registry,, respond at once."

"Hello, Venator," the spaceman said, and heard his companion catch her breath. Himself, he was not very surprised.

"Kenmuir?" The tone was equally cool. "I rather thought so. And greeting, Alice Tarn. It's doubtless you who boarded with him."

Kenmuir signed her not to speak. Why give anything away? "I daresay you'd like an explanation."

"More than that, my friend. Considerably more. Do you two have any conception of what you have brought on yourselves?"

"A public inquiry will determine whether we are justified."

"Everyone at Guthrie House will be arrested, you know. You've probably destroyed your beloved Fireball Trothdom. Did you intend that?"

Fireball Enterprises had destroyed itself in bringing down an evil, the spaceman thought. For the first time, he wondered what agonies of soul Matthias was undergoing.

"Something may yet be salvaged," Venator urged. "Cease acceleration, admit boarders when they match velocity, and come back to discourse like reasonable human beings."

"Will the world listen in?" Kenmuir demanded. "What guarantees of that can you give us?"

"None. You would see through any trick we attempted, as suspicious as you are. How can I persuade you that this is not a matter which ought to be public?"

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Kenmuir's lips pulled back from his teeth. "That would be difficult, wouldn't it?" Inwardly he thought Matthias's choice had been easy, set beside this that he must make. Were he and Aleka in the right?

"Every minute you let go by, you're in worse trouble," Venator said, "What cause do you imagine you're serving? Lilisaire's? What she intends—we have reason to believe—could cost millions of lives. Do you want them on your conscience?"

"No. If you're telling the truth. Are you?" Now Kenmuir could speak the name. "Your people lied about Proserpina for lifetimes."

"There are good reasons to keep that confidential, till the world is ready. I—no, the cybercosm will be glad to explain them to you, in privacy."

"Will it? Or will we—my partner and I—simply disappear?"

Venator sighed. "You've been watching too many historical dramas." Sternly: "Consider this an ultimatum. If you surrender now, clemency is possible, for you and for Fireball. Later, I fear not."

"What about the Covenant, and our rights under it? I tell you again, we want total disclosure.

Otherwise you're in worse violation than we could ever be."

"The Covenant makes provision for emergencies—" Venator broke off. After a half minute, while Earth dwindled and Luna grew: "You are determined."

"We are," Kenmuir said to him and to himself.

"Your record suggests you mean that. I shall not let you talk a delaying action." Venator laughed softly. "Nor shall I wish you luck. But may you survive. I'd like to talk candidly with you, intelligence to intelligence. Ave atque vale."

The light went out. "Transmission ended," the ship said.

Kenmuir glanced once more at Earth, If he "could broadcast, rouse those who loved freedom—But the signal must go through satellite relays if it was to have THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 519

any chance of being heard, and they were under control.

And how many on the planet would especially care?

Matthias had said he felt the walls closing in, all his life. Kenmuir had not, until lately. At least, not in the upper part of his mind. Down below, had he too sensed that he was caged?

Was he?

He shook the questions off, as a dog shakes off the water of a cold river, and began unharnessing.

"It should be a steady run," he told Aleka, "but we'd better have spacesuits on, in case." He'd definitely need his.

She nodded. Under two gravities, the dark hair fell straight and thickly past her face. " 'Ae."

They went aft. For a few minutes before donning the gear, they kissed.

When they returned, he called for data on pursuit. They were few and the probable errors were high, but instruments did appear to show two or three vessels bound through an intercept cone for his deep-space course. How they proposed to stop Kestrel, short of ramming, he didn't know. But they were of modem design with far more delta v. If necessary, they could hound her till she exhausted her reaction mass, then draw alongside.

He began entering the detailed instructions that would enable Aleka to take command. "I hope I'm not too clumsy with you," he said into his communicator, impulsively, foolishly.

"You haven't Kyra's skill," Kestrel answered, "but your hands feel much like hers."

43

1 he ship neared Luna.

By then it was certainly clear to the hunters that they had been deceived and this was in fact her destination. But they could not stop her. All spacecraft capable of interception were now too distant to arrive in time. There were no missiles available that she could not dodge. Those emplaced on the Moon were few and slow, intended for unlikely targets, such as a large meteoroid on a catastrophic orbit. Constabulary and Peace Authority forces were doubtless on full alert, but that was of no immediate help.

The moment came when Aleka looked into the eyes behind Kenmuir^s helmet and said through the radio, "Aloha. Let's hope it's not forever. You've become .. . more than a friend, do you know?"

He found no words, could merely smile and touch a glove to her hand before they went their separate ways.

Waiting, enclosed in an airlock chamber, the drive unit and its mass tank so heavy under the acceleration that he must sit against them, he felt a slight shock, and after a minute or two another. Aleka had dispatched their decoys. He imagined the carrier modules, braking down toward widespread points on the surface—points not far from Selenarchic strongholds. He pictured Aleka, hastening back to the command cabin, transmitting to Zamok Vysoki: Lilisaire, have someone retrieve those cylinders before the opposition does. No telling if the Lunarian, or any Lunarian, got that message, or was able to act on it, or willing to try. But it should distract the government's forces. With reasonable luck, his departure should escape their attention.

Of course, they'd keep their radars and other detec-

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tors constantly on this vessel. However, she'd oriented her hull so that he probably wouldn't register as he left. If a beam did happen to sweep across- him afterward, he could hope the program would note him as a piece of cosmic debris and continue following the ship.

The plan might not work. No matter how carefully he and Kestrel had calculated the odds on the basis of accessible data, it was a gamble.

Life always was.

Weight vanished. Engine turned off, the ship swung around Luna at scarcely more than low orbital speed. He felt the throb of the air pump emptying the chamber. Light from the overhead fixture shrank to a puddle, with vague reflections off the sides, as diffusion ceased. He braced his muscles. Time to go. An uncanny calm was upon him.

The outer valve opened. Starful darkness welled in the portal. By the handhold he grasped, he pulled himself to the flange and pushed his soles down against the little platform of the personnel springer. His free hand sought its touchoff. The platform tilted, jerked, and tossed him out.

Slowly tumbling, he saw the universe whirl, Milky Way, Earth, Luna. The sun crossed his vision and his helmet dusked to save it, turning the disc to dull gold, a coin on which the spots were a mintage he could not read. At first Kestrel stretched gigantic. She receded from him at the several meters per second he had gained relative to her. She was still large across the stars when he guessed it was safe for him to boost, but now he saw her whole, slim and beautiful.

Aleka, though, was locked inside, Aleka who would have wished to die on the sea with the wind caressing her hair.

Kenmuir got busy.

The frame of the drive unit curved a member around in front to support the control board before his chest, an incongruously cheerful array of colored

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lights. He keyed for despin. A short thrust stabilized the sky around him. The unit's computer was comparatively simple, but adequate for the tasks ahead. Earth steadied to a thick, broken piece of blue-and-white glass. Luna reached across a quarter of the heavens, its night part like a hole down to infinity, its day part mercilessly lighted, wrinkled, pocked, and blotched. Without opticals, he saw no trace of manwork. Memory could have given him cities, huge flowers, birds and soarflyers above a lake, Lilisaire; but he lacked time for remembering.

He deployed navigation gear, peered and measured, identified three landmarks and put their bearings into the computer. After a bit he repeated, thus getting the information for it to figure his location, altitude, and vector function. Radar would have been better, more direct, but he dared not risk it. He had already entered the coordinates at which he wanted to land. Now he keyed for thrust.

The drive unit swung him around to the proper orientation. Accumulators commenced discharging their energy in earnest. From a mass tank as broad as he was and half as long, three jets sprang.

Condensation made a cloud some distance beyond the nozzles —this system was not as efficient as a nuclear-driven plasma jet, nor remotely as powerful—but the cloud was thin, barely visible at close range, and rapidly dissipated. Weight tugged again at Kenmuir. Ever faster, Kestrel went from him, became a toy, a jewel, a star, and was gone.

For the next half hour he had little to do but take further sightings and let the unit correct his flight parameters accordingly. Acceleration mounted until it settled at approximately one g; thereafter the rate of exhaust diminished together with mass. He would have preferred to go more speedily, whatever the stress on his body, but the strength of the frame was limited. At that, he'd arrive with tank almost empty and accumulators nearly dead.

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His thoughts wandered. Aleka—Presently she'd take lunosynchronous orbit. It would not be straight ( above him, but she would be in his sky. When Jje landed, perhaps ninety minutes would be left until the: first of the Authority ships, returning at full blast J could reach her. She must be gone well before then.

Lilisaire—It would be strange if some strands of her web did not extend into the police and the Authority, even now, even now. Unless they had seized her—and he felt sure she had made arrangements for trumpeting that to the Solar System—she knew where Kestrel wdis and that somehow this concerned her. What she might do about it, he couldn't tell. If she could keep them busy for an hour or two, that would be helpful. True, it would add to the score against him and her and Fireball... He expelled foreboding.

Annie—A wistful ghost. He glanced at Earth and hoped life was being kind to her.

Time passed. Slowly, descending, he flew from one night toward another.

His approach had been planned more for concealment than fuel economy. Landsats doubtless spotted him, as they spotted virtually everything when turned to maximum gain, but he should be inconspicuous, insignificant, nothing to trigger an alarm report from those robots, especially when they were focused on events elsewhere. Tycho Crater hove above the horizon.

By then he was so low that he saw it not as a bowl but as a mountain, black and monstrous against the stars. Though the sun was at early morning, the west side remained in darkness. Shadow went down it and across the land like a sluggishly ebbing tide. At first, far to his right and his left, Kenmuir glimpsed the shores of day. Nearing, he lost that sight, he had just the stars and waning Earth. In its last quarter, the planet yet stood radiant, halfway up the northern sky. Blue-white light washed over vast terraced slopes.

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Ray-splash brightened the ruggedness below them. He found his goal and came down on manual.

Dust stormed briefly, blindingly around him. It fell, unhindered by air; the material of suit and helmet repelled it; he looked out over a ledge partway down the ringwall, a pitted levelness long and broad, with nighted rock athwart the east and everywhere else the heavens.

The aftermath rustling of the jets faded out of his ears. Silence took him into itself. When he had uncoupled from the drive unit and tank, under Moonweight he felt feathery, as if half disembodied. His suit, aircycler, and other outfitting were of small mass and close fit, homeostatic, power-jointed, tactile-amplifying, well-nigh a second skin. He unbound his pack of equipment. It should not have seemed heavy either; but he saw the sledgehammer strapped across it, cold touched him, and for a moment he could not lift the load.

Needs must. He shouldered it and started across the ground. Dust puffed from footsteps until he came to the road the builders had carved down the ringwall from within the crater. It was hardly more than a trail of hard-packed regolith, and the pilgrims upon it had become few, but the cosmos would take a while longer to bury it.

Ahead of him rested the tomb. Some said that download she who lay here had ordered that it be simple. Seven meters in width, four walls of white stone rose sheer to a low-pitched roof of such height that each side was seen as enclosable in a golden rectangle. A double bronze door in front bore the same proportions. Above it was chiseled the name DAGNY EBBESEN BEYNAC. That was enough.

Kenmuir stopped at the entrance. Through a minute outside of time, he forgot haste, forgot his need, and was only there. Walls and metal glimmered dimly1 below Earth and the stars.

It was as if stillness deepened. With a shiver, he

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took forth the key that Lars Rydberg had secretly made and brought back with him. He laid it against the lock. The program remembered the code. A pointer turned downward. At his pull, the leaves of the door swung ponderously away from an inner night. He stiffened his heart and trod past them.

At first he was blind, alone with his pulse. Then his eyes adapted. Light drifted in, barely touching an altar block at the middle. His right hand rose to his helmet, a Fireball salute.

But hurry, now, hurry. He unslung his pack, set it down, fetched a lamp, turned it on and left it at his feet. Luminance leaped, cut by sharp-edged shadows. Two objects stood on the block. One was a funerary urn, slim and graceful; he thought again of Kestrel. The other was a download in its case.

Hurry, hur-y. Observe, work by helmet light, carry out the necessary violation and crush the guilt beneath your heel; later it shall arise unbruised.

A meter showed that the downlead's energy pack was drained but intact, a relief to Kenmuir although he had a replacement. He attached an accumulator to recharge it, by a jack handmade to fit the obsolete socket. While that went on, he set about reactivating the neural network.

Disguising what he had not done, Lars Rydberg had slipped in a bypass program. At Guthrie House, a counteractive module had been prepared, which Kenmuir applied. Thereafter he laid a radio communicator on the altar, found the appropriate spot on the case, and made linkage. Now he and she could speak through the hollowness around them.

He touched the final switch, stepped back, and shuddered.

Light glared from below, off the face of the block, throwing urn and download into murk. Out of this, centimeter by centimeter, the eyestalks wavered upward. Lenses gleamed, searching about and about the tomb.

After an endlessness Kenmuir heard the voice, a

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woman's voice, faint, as if it reached him across an abyss, dragging and stumbling. ** 'Mond . . .

No, Lars, oh, Lars . . ."

He had not forseen how pain would cramp him together. "Forgive me," he croaked.

"Uncans!" Dagny screamed.

"Wh-what?"

"Dark, dark, and dark—'* Despair swept away before tenderness. "Don't cry, darling. Mother's here."

Kenmuir gripped his will to him. "My lady Beynac, forgive me," he got out, as best he could utter her language. "I've had to call you back."

"Where are my arms?" she moaned, while the eyes talks threshed to and fro. "I'll pick you up and cuddle you, baby, baby mine, but where are my arms? My lips, 'Mond?"

"I've called you back for your people's sake," Kenmuir said, "your blood and his," and wondered whether he lied.

"The blood ran out. When they got my spacesuit off. It was all over everything."

"That happened—long ago—"

"Little Juliana, she was all blood . . . No, not Juliana. She'd never be, would she? Not now." The download wailed.

She was remembering something old, Kenmuir knew. But what? Could she remember more? "My lady Beynac, please listen. Please."

"It roars," Dagny mumbled.

A damaged circuit, Kenmuir thought. It must be generating a signal the mind perceived as noise, whatever was left of the mind.

The sound in his earplugs softened. "The sea roars. Breakers. Wind. Salt. Driftwood like huge bones. Here, a sand dollar. For you, Uncans." She laughed, quietly and lovingly.

"My lady," Kenmuir pleaded, "do you know where you are?" Who you are?

"Lars—" The eyestalks came to rest. He felt her THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 527

peer at him. He felt knives in his flesh. "But you're not Lars," she said without tone. "You're nobody."

"My name—"

"Lars, you ended me. Didn't you?"

Hope flickered, very faint. Kenmuir drew breath. "I have to tell you—But I've come as a friend.

They need your help again on the Moon."

Chill replied. "There wasn't going to be any again."

"I'm afraid—"

Sudden gentleness: "Don't be afraid. 'Mond never was. 'Bloody 'ell!' he'd shout, and change ahead."

Snatching after anything, Kenmuir responded, "Like Anson Guthrie. Also after he became . . . like you."

"Sigurd was never afraid either," Dagny crooned. "He loved danger. He laughed with it. Not at it, with it. That's Kaino, you know."

"Yes," Kenmuir said dully. "Your son."

"They're dead. They died on dead rocks in deep . space. 'Mond and Kaino are dead."

"I know." In desperation: "That's what I'm here about. You, you carried on. You lived on, for all the others."

The download began to sing, softly and minor-key.

"He is dead and gone, lady,

He is dead ana gone; At his head a grass-green turf;

At his heels a stone."

She stopped. "Only—no grass grows yonder." "It may yet," Kenmuir said. "If you will help, this one last time." The eyes stood unbending, the voice went grim.

"Lars promised." "He did. But—" "To 'Mond, you said, Lars. I'd go to where 'Mond is."

"He hoped, with his whole heart he hoped." She laughed. He heard the bitterness. "Estupido.

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Dagny went there. She was free to. Ghosts aren't. How could they have a birthright? They were never bora."

"You are Dagny Beynac," he said into her delirium. "As Anson Guthrie the download is Anson Guthrie. The man, his spirit."

Eyestalks trembled, voice quickened. "Guthrie? Uncans? He still is?"

"Not here," Kenmuir sighed. "At far Centaurus. It's been centuries, Madame Beynac."

"And the wind blew and blew," she murmured.

"Centuries."

She didn't seem to hear him. "From a story I read once when I was a child. By Lord Dunsany. They hanged a highwayman out on the heath and left him there alone. And the wind blew and blew."

Bring her attention back, hold it to the point. "Yes, Lars Rydberg broke his word to you. In a way. He hoped you'd rest in peace forever as you wished, that nobody would have to raise you. But I must. For a moment, a single moment. One question." Time was blowing by. How many minutes were left him?

"Where is your face, 'Mond?" The voice cracked across. "I can't bring back your face any more."

"One question, and /'// give you peace. But now, at once, or it's no good."

"'Mond, 'You are Dagny's son,' you said to Lars, 'Mond. 'You shall be welcome here, by damn, always.' " How might a download weep?

And Lars had betrayed them both, Kerimuir thought. Or had he?

As if from the stars beyond the door, an idea struck through. "I've seen his images, Edmond Beynac's. His face was wide and, and angular, with high cheekbones and green eyes."

"Yes!" Dagny shouted. "Yes! Oh, 'Mond, welcome back! Bienvenu, mon chfri!"

Pursue. "He showed the way to Proserpina."

"Bloody hell, yes, he did!"

Kenmuir spoke fast, but as he would have spoken to a beloved. "Hear me, I beg you. Your people, his

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descendants and yours, they need Proserpina now, they need it terribly, and it's been lost. Do you remember how to find it?"

Anger flashed. "For this you woke me?"

He stood straight before the eyes. "Yes. If you can't forgive me, will^ou anyhow help?"

Suddenly he heard warmth. "I have 'Mond back. For that, thanks."

"Will you tell me?"

"Will you send me home to him?"

"Yes." He bent down to his pack, loosed certain knots, and lifted the sledgehammer in his hands.

"I have this." Each single'word he must ram out of his mouth.

"Then quickly," she implored, "before I lose him again."

He could say no more? The silence took them.

"Far and far," she sighed, "a long way to go for a death. But Proserpina brings the springtime with her. Apple blossoms behind Daddy's and Mother's house ..."

Was she slipping back into nightmare? "The orbital elements!" Kenmuir yelled.

"Quiet," she bade him. "My caveman's hunting them for me."

He waited. Through the open door, .the stars watched.

"Yes," Dagny said. "Here they are. Thanks, old bear." She recited the numbers. "Do you have them?"

"I do,".he answered: on a recorder and cut into his brain.

"Good," she said calmly. "Now, your promise."

Terror snatched at him. "Do you truly want—?"

"For me," she said. "And for Lars."

"I owe it you, then," he heard himself say. His hands closed hard on the helve. "Goodbye, my lady."

"Fare you well," she said like a benediction. Command rang forth: "Now!"

He swung the hammer up over his head and back down, with all his force. The case was strong, but it

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was not meant to take impacts like that, and radiation had weakened it. Organometal split asunder.

Iron crushed circuits.

He cast the hammer from him and reeled out of the tomb. Stars blazed.

No, he must not cry, he must not huddle into grief, not yet. Kestrel and Aleka were, aloft. He switched his radio on. They could receive across the tens of thousands of kilometers between, and it mattered no longer that others heard. "Are you there?" he called. "Come in, come in."

"Yes," the dear voice responded. "Oh, darling, you're hurt."

"Record this." He rattled off the figures. "Do you have them?"

"Yes—"

"On your way."

"Aloha au id 'oe," he heard. "I love you." He could not see, but he could imagine the spaceship surge forward.

He slumped down onto the regolith and waited for Venator's men. The sun broke over the ringwall.

44

1 he Peace Authority vessel drove Earthward at half a gravity.

She was big, with space for some cabins. Kenmuir had been put in one by himself. The door was locked. His guards had told him that if he needed anything he could ask for it through the intercom, but thus far he had not. What he most wanted was to be alone.

Well, he would have liked a viewscreen, that he might look out upon the stars. Cramped and barren, the room crowded him together with his thoughts.

For the hundredth or the thousandth weary time he

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wondered how all this had come to pass, how he turned into a rebel and a killer. Why? He never intended or foresaw it. Events seemed to have acquired their own momentum, almost a will of their own. Was that the nature of human history? Chaos— strange attractors—how much did the Teramind itself understand? How much did God?

The door spread. It reclosed as a blue-clad figure stepped through. Kenmuir rose from the unfolded bunk. For a few seconds they stood motionless, two men tall and lean, one dark, one pale.

"Greeting, Captain Kenmuir," the newcomer said in Anglo of the eastern hemisphere.

"You're Pragmatic Venator, aren't you?" the prisoner replied. "So we meet at last."

The officer nodded. "I want to talk with you while we can be private."

"Private? Your machines are watching and listening, I'm sure."

"They're your machines too." Humanity's.

"We're both in error. They're nobody's." Robots reporting to sophotects that ultimately were facets of the supreme intellect.

"No contradiction," Venator said. "Your partner is yours, and you are hers, but neither is property."

Something stirred in Kenmuir. He had felt emotionally emptied; but he found that he could again care. "What about Aleka? What can you tell me?" What will you?

Venator raised his brows. "Aleka? . . . Oh, yes. Alice Tarn. She's alive and well." A smile flickered. "Inconveniently much. That's what I mainly have to discuss with you, if you're able."

Kenmuir shrugged. "I'm able, if not exactly willing. The constabulary on Luna were . . . not unkind. I'm medicated and rested." In the body, at least. The mind, the soul—Anxiety died. He returned to the detachment that had possessed him of late, whether because he had been unknowingly tranquilized or

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because his spirit was exhausted; he stood apart from himself, a Cartesian consciousness observing its destiny unfold.

"Shall we sit?" Venator suggested.

"No need." Nor wish.

"Do you care for refreshment? We've much to talk about."

"No, I don't want anything" that they aboard could give him.

"Pray rest assured you're in no danger," Venator said "You're in civilized keeping." The features Weakened, the tone flattened. "Perhaps more civilized than you deserve."

"We can argue rights and wrongs later, can't we?"

Venator went back to mildness. "I believe we'll do more than argue, Captain. But, true, we'd best get the empirical out of the way first. Would you tell me why, m-m, Aleka didn't take you along when she escaped?"

"Isn't that obvious? I'd have had to retreat to a safe distance, then run to the ship, after which she'd have had to lift. It could have cost us as much as an hour. We didn't have that long."

"Obvious, yes. An hour at two gravities means an extra seven kilometers per second. I was probing the degree of your determination. I don't suppose you'll tell me where she's bound?"

"I can't. She and the ship decided it between them after letting me off."

"As I expected," Venator said calmly. "What you don't know can't be extracted from you. Not that it matters. One may guess. The goal clearly isn't Mars, which would be a hazardous choice in any case. Several asteroids are possible, or conceivably a Lunarian-colonized Jovian satellite. She's running on trajectory now, conserving her delta v and thus her options. Unless she comes to fear we may close in, and accelerates afresh, it will take a while for her to reach whatever goal she has in mind."

Whereupon she would be in communication range. Kestrel's antiquated laser wouldn't carry an intelligi-THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 533

ble message across two or three astronomical units; her radio would require a high-gain receiver; and who yonder would be listening for either? Close by, Aleka's intent to signal would be unmistakable. She might perhaps land.

"Your scheme worked, fantastical though it ^vas," Venator continued. "I think it worked precisely because it was fantastical. We can't overhaul her before she completes her mission, and we aren't trying any longer."

Yes, Kenmuir thought, he and she had estimated a reasonable probability of that. The ships of law enforcement were few and widely scattered through the Solar System, because their usual work was just to convey personnel or sometimes give aid to the distressed. Besides, even today, the Falcon class counted as high-powered. It had become mostly robots and sophotects that crossed space. They seldom demanded energy-wasting speed. It was humans who were short-lived and impatient.

"You see, we don't want to provoke her into haste," Venator explained. "We want time to persuade you two of your folly, so you'll stop of your free choice." He frowned. "Consider. Do you imagine the revelation of a minor planet out among the comets will make you heroes? Think about it. Your brutal destruction of the Beynac download will shock the world."

Kenmuir sighed. "I told the police and I told, them, she made me promise."

"Need you have kept the promise?"

Kenmuir nodded. "She'd been betrayed once."

Venator's smile was briefly unpleasant. "To your benefit, as it turned out."

Kenmuir made a grin and gestured around his cell. "This?"

"I didn't mean you were after personal gain," Venator said. "I confess that your motives puzzle me, and suspect they puzzle you also."

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away—that he and Aleka had been the instruments of some great blind force, and it was not done with them yet, and they themselves were among its wellsprings. But he had better stay with immediacies. He could take advantage of the huntsman's desire for conversation.

"What's the situation on Luna?" he asked. His interrogators there had given him no news.

Venator's voice and bearing eased. "Well," he said as if it were interesting but of little importance, "the lady Lilisaire caused us considerable trouble, in which several of her colleagues gleefully joined. Fortunately, we avoided significant damage or casualties on either side, and things are quiet now. Officially they're under house arrest. In practice, what we have is an uneasy truce. The outcome of that will depend largely on you, my friend."

"How?"

Venator turned serious. "You can still halt what you've set moving. Tam has ignored our calls, but Kestrel must have taken note of them and will doubtless inform her of any that come from you."

"What could I have to say?" Not, in the presence of machines, that he thought he loved her.

"You, and you alone, can make her come back, keeping the secret of Proserpina."

"Why should I?"

"Criminal charges can be dismissed, you know, or a pardon can be granted."

Emotion stirred anew in Kenmuir. The sharpest part of it was anger. "See here," he stated, "I never proposed to serve as a martyr, nor does she. If and when the news comes out, the Solar System will decide whether we did wrong. In spite of—" his voice faltered "—the download—when that story too is made clear ... I dare hope for pardon from the whole human race."

"Spare me the rhetoric, please," Venator scoffed. "You've calculated that the government will be in so awkward a position that its best move will be to

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quietly let infractions go unpunished, while the more radical Lunarians prepare to emigrate to Proserpina. In exchange, you won't emphasize any irregularities we may have committed."

Kenmuir nodded. "Yes, that's approximately what we're trying for."

"I've gathered you're a student of history," Venator said. "Tell me, with how many governments of the past would that calculation have been rational?"

Surprised, Kenmuir stood wordless before he muttered, "I don't know. Perhaps none."

"Correct. You'd have been dead by now, unless we chose to torture you first. If our secret got released, we'd put down the restless Lunarians by force, exterminating them if necessary. We'd tell people that the revelation was a falsehood concocted by you evildoers. We'd go on to tell the people, at considerable and emotional length, what a service we had done them, suppressing these enemies of the state. But most of the propaganda we wouldn't issue ourselves. Plenty of journalists and intellectuals would be eager to curry favor by manufacturing and disseminating it.

Many among them would be sincere."

"Yes ,. ."

"As it is, you are safe, while Tam runs loose because we did not expect that major weapons of war would ever be needed again. You have the cybercosm to thank, Kenmuir. You might show some trust, some gratitude."

"But you violated the Covenant!" the spaceman protested. "And—and—" And what? How horrible an offense, really, was the hiding of a piece of information?

"Exigencies arise," Venator said. "My hope is to convince you of that, before it is too late."

"Suppose you do," Kenmuir retorted wildly. "How can I convince Aleka?" Any passwords or the like could have been drugged or brainphased out of him. Any image of him could be an artifact, in this world where so much reality was virtual.

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Venator hesitated. When he spoke, it was slowly, and did the thin face draw into lines of want?

"She ought to listen to you and have faith in you, ought she not? As for how she shall know that it is in truth you—" He looked away, as if he wished to see through the metal to stars and Earth.

"My intuition is that you two are lovers. All the little intimacies, body language unique to the pair of you, incidents forgotten by one until the other reminds of them, the wholeness arisen in even as brief a time as you've had—if we wrung that quantity of data out of you, the process would leave you a vegetable. And could we write an adequate program to use it with a generated image?

Perhaps the Teramind could. Perhaps not. I daresay it could reprogram your brain, so that you would become its worshipper and ardently do, of your own volition, whatever it wished."

He lifted a hand. "Have no fears," he said. "Besides the morality of destroying a mind, we are barred by the fact that we haven't time enough, neither to make a convincing imitation of you nor to make you over. You are not electrophotonic, you are organic, with the inertia of all material things. Molecular interactions go at rates constrained by the laws of the universe, and the Teramind did not write those."

His fists clenched at his sides. "Explain that to your Aleka. She will'know you by what you share, everything that I have denied myself."

He smiled and finished lightly, "Ironic, isn't it, that at this final .hour the cybercosm must appeal to the oldest, most primitive force in sentient life?"

Kenmuir ran a tongue gone dry across his lips. "If you can indeed recruit me."

Venator gazed straight at him and answered, "/ can't. I am bringing you to the Teramind."

45

A vast and duskful space—a chamber? Sight did not reach to the heights and ends of it. Glowing lines arched aloft and down again, some close together, some meters apart. Seen over a distance, they merged in an intricacy, a hieroglyph unknown to Kenmuir.

The air was without heat or cold or scent or sound.

He had woken here after falling asleep in the room at Central to which Venator brought him.

Unwarned but somehow unsurprised, he saw himself stretched half reclining in a web from which a number of attachments made contact with feet, hands, brow, temples. His skin and clothes were either illuminated or faintly, whitely shining. A mighty calm was upon him,, yet he had never felt this aware and alert, wholly in command of mind and body. He sensed as it were every least flow through blood vessels, nerves, and brain. Solemnly he awaited that which was to happen.

Facing him, Venator lay likewise; but although the huntsman's eyes were open, they seemed blind and his visage had become a mask. What now did he see, what knowledge was his?

The presence of the Teramind, Kenmuir thought, the nearness of the great core engine, save that the Teramind was no single machine or being. It was the apex of the cybercosm, the guiding culmination, as the human brain was of the human organism. No, not really that, either. All machines in a way stemmed from it, like men and gods from Brahm, and the souls of its synnoionts yearned home toward it.

But here was no static finality, Kenmuir knew. This was not what artificial intelligences, set to creating a superior artificial intelligence, had wrought; it was the cybercosm as a whole, evolving. Already its thoughts went beyond human imagination. How far beyond its 538

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own present imagination would they range in another hundred or another billion years?

Venator's lips parted. "lan Kenmuir," he said gravely. Did the Teramind speak through him, as through an oracle?

"I am ready," Kenmuir responded. He had no honorific to add; any would have been a mockery.

"You understand you are neither sophotect nor synnoiont You are outside. Therefore I shall be what link between us there may be."

Otherwise, could the presence give Kenmuir more than discourse, displays, a shadow show? By Venator, whose flesh was human, he might be made able to comprehend, to feel, what the unhuman alone could never quite convey.

"Ask what you will," said the voice.

"You know what has brought us to this," replied Kenmuir as quietly. "Why have you kept Proserpina hidden away?"

"The answer is many-sided."

And will it be true? wondered a rebellious mote.

"You shall judge its truth for yourself," said the voice.

Self-evident truth, at the end of a road of reasoning? But could he follow that road, up and up to its end? "I listen. I watch."

Something like an expression fleeted over Venator's countenance and through his tone. A pain, a longing? "We share a memory, you and I."

Luminous amidst the dark, the image of Lilisaire, so alive that even then Kenmuir caught his breath. The gown rustled and rippled about her slenderness. Felinely, she turned to look at him.

Dark-red and flame-red, her hair fell over the white shoulders, past the fine blue vein in her throat. She smiled at him with the big, oblique, changeably gold and green eyes and with the lips he remembered. Did she purr, did she call?

More images came, flickered, and fled. It was not a document, not a sequence or montage, it was a stream

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of dreams to awaken him. Beneath his tranquility, it hurt. He had not wished to count up her lovers, her betrayals, the men she killed and the men she had had killed, the men she wedded and enwebbed, the men she broke to her will or lured down ways whereon they lost themselves, the willfulness now glacial and now ablaze but always without reckoning or ruth, the fact that she was feral.

"Beautiful, boundlessly ambitious, infinitely dangerous," murmured the voice.

"No," Kenmuir denied. "Can't be. One mortal woman—"

"One whom circumstance has made the embodiment of her blood."

Images out of history. Lunarian arrogance, intransigence, outright lawlessness, in the teeth of unforgiving space Intrigues, murders, terrible threats. The Selen-archy sovereign, holding its nation apart from the unity of humankind. Rinndalir's scheme to wreck the whole order of things, for the sake of wrecking it. Niolente's fomenting of revolt on Earth and war on the Moon, her death like a cornered animal's, and in the ruins a secret that her bloodline had kept through centuries. Lilisaire, again Lilisaire.

"No!" Kenmuir shouted, the calm within him shaken asunder. "I won't condemn an entire race!" He swallowed. "I can't believe you would."

"Never. Do we curse the lightning or the tiger? They too belong with life."

Next the dream was of a world. A thunderbolt fixed nitrogen that nourished a forest. Under the leaves, a carnivore took his prey and thereby kept a herd healthy, its numbers no more than the land could well feed. The sea that drowned some ships upbore all others, and in its depths swam whales and over their heads beat wings. Dead bodies moldered, to be reborn as grass and flowers.

Snow fell, to melt beneath springtime and water it.

A specter passed by, desert, rock thrusting naked where plowed soil had washed away and blown away.

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A river ran thick with poison. Air gnawed at lungs. Horde upon horde, humankind laid waste around it as never a plague of locusts did, and where songbirds once nested rats ran through the alleys and the sewers.

But that was gone, or almost gone, and Earth bloomed afresh. It was the cybercosm that saved the forests and their tigers—yes, human determination was necessary, but only through technology could the change happen without catastrophe, and the cybercosm kept the will to make the change alive in humans by its counsel and its ever more visible victories over desolation.

Again the tiger sprang in Kenmuir's sight. Phantasmagoria ended. He lay among the gleaming arcs and heard: "Equally should the Lunarian people, who have done much that is magnificent, join their gifts to the rest of humanity in creating and becoming human destiny."

Though peace had returned to him, it still served his selfhood, his mind. "This is true, but is it enough? Why must every branch of us grow the same way? And what way is it?"

"No single one. Whatever multitudinous ways you and your descendants choose. Think back. Who today is forced? Is Earth not as diverse as at any time formerly, or more?"

Yes, Kenmuir agreed: and not just in societies and uncoerced individuals but in the richness of nature restored across the globe, from white bear on polar ice to bison and antelope on the plains, from hawks asoar to peacocks in the jungle, from palm to pine, from mountaintop to ocean depth, alive, alive.

The voice went on: "However, should not reason, compassion, and reverence guide you? Else you are less than apes, for apes at least act according to their birthright, and it is in your birthright to think."

Kenmuir could not help but recall what else was inborn, and how thin a glimmer consciousness was upon it. But let him not stray off into that realm. Get THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 541

back to the question that brought him here. "Why don't you want Proserpina known? Are you afraid of a few Lunarians on a distant asteroid?"

As ridiculous as that sounded, he nearly regretted uttering it. Then he decided it was best gotten rid of.

The reply came grave. He thought that the Teramind had no need to bluster like the God of Job; it could afford patience, yes, courtesy. "Of course not—as such. What is to be feared is the spirit that would be resurrected. In the end, fate lies with the spirit."

"I, I don't understand," Kenmuir faltered. It couldn't mean some mind-over-matter absurdity.

"The Faustian spirit. It is not dead, not quite, here on Earth; it lives, underground and unrecognized, in the Lunarians; and at Alpha Centauri it flourishes triumphant."

Kenmuir knew not whether the vision of Demeter came to him out of the darkness or out of memory.

How often had he filled himself with those images transmitted by the colonists across the years and light-years? How much was envy a bitter or a wistful part of his being? Lost in the dream, he could merely ask, "What's wrong there?"—for all he saw was splendor, courage, and ineluctable tragedy.

"It was, it is a spirit that does not accept limits, that has no end or check on its wants and its endeavors. The forebears of the folk yonder would not make their peace with the powers they had aggrieved at home, although peace was offered them. They were not able to, because they were never content. Therefore they chose to depart, over a bridge that burned behind them, to a world they knew was doomed. Now their descendants will not accept that doom."

"What else can they do?" sighed Kenmuir. What else but resign themselves, talcing whatever comfort lay in the fact that oblivion was still some centuries removed? It had taken every resource that Fireball at its height commanded to send a few "bodies in cold 542

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sleep across the gulf between. At Centauri they could do no more than this; and unless a handful came back to Sol, any such effort would be futile. The distance to the next marginally habitable world was too much; radiation during the voyage would wreak irreparable damage. Downloads could go, yes. Guthrie's explored among those stars. But the humans were rare who wished to be downloads. Those that did could continue as well at the sun where they were, together with the Lunarians on their asteroids: a settlement as unmeaning as Rapa Nui had been in its Pacific loneliness after the canoes no longer sailed.

"They do not yet know it," said the voice, "but they are finding their way toward a salvation."

"How do you know?" Kenmuir demanded. "You don't care, do you?"

"Granted, the Teramind tells them through the cybercosm, as it tells the people at home, that it has little further interest in them, or in anything of the empirical universe. That is not entirely so. If the ultimate law of physics is now known, the permutations of matter and energy are not. Therefore probes are seeking forth through interstellar space. As for the Centaurians, microprobes are observing them, unobserved by them."

It stabbed Kenmuir. Did then the cybercosm lie?

Peace flowed healingly into the wound. There must be a righteous reason, which he would learn in due course. What human was always candid, perhaps especially with those others who were loved?

Indeed, pretense is a necessity of thought. You map three-dimensional planets onto two-dimensional surfaces; and this itself is a simplification, for the map is not a Euclidean plane. To compute their short-term orbits, you make those planets into geometrical mass-points and ignore everything else in the galaxy. You found a corporation and treat it legally as a person. You talk about a community or the human race, although nothing exists but individuals. You talk about individuals, or yourself, although the body is many different

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organisms and the mind is a set of ongoing interactions. . . .

"And we do hear something directly from them," he offered.

However avidly he had studied it, not until this moment did he quite appreciate how seldom that news came, how slight it was. At first it had been voluminous, to and fro, but later—Well, he thought, it would not be hard to discourage the colonists from sending. They had so much else to occupy them. As for the Solar System, here too people were wrapped in their own concerns and had half forgotten about a frontier or uncharted ranges beyond it. ... "They're developing a symbiosis—" not a synnoiosis "—of ., . life and machine?"

"Yes. Demeter Mother."

This time the visions were clear, lasting amply long for him to apprehend them, and they spoke.

They spoke of another and alien system, a biocosm, integral with the basic ecology. There the ultimate mind was not cybernetic but human, downloads who had in this wise returned to being alive, a Gaia not transcendent but immanent in and aware of herself. She guarded and guided life.

She was life.

—Afterward Kenmuir whispered, "What's dreadful about this?"

"It is what will save them at Centauri," answered Venator's lips. His eyes remained blind, except to whatever moved inside him. "The Mother will find that she can do what is impossible today, take a personality from download back to re-created flesh. Demeter the planet must die, but the seed of Demeter will go forth among the stars."

Shivers went cold through Kenmuir.

"Yes," said the voice—sadly?—"you are inspired, you are wonder-smitten."

Defiance stirred anew. "Why should I not be?"

"The vision, the achievement is wholly Faustian. And likewise would the settlement of Proserpina be: of a far lesser magnitude, but in the same spirit, and 544

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not light-years remote but here, at home, within striking distance of Earth."

Kenmuir felt his face show bewilderment.

"Attend," said the voice. "Your kind has always fought, as life must, for survival and for betterment. And, uniquely, you did not fit your ways to reality, you changed the world to fit you.

You tamed fire and crops and beasts, you explored, you invented, you spread across the planet. The landscapes of whole countries were, century by century, made into creations not of nature but of their human dwellers.

"Yet always, too, there was a sense of limits, humility, fear of the gods and of the nemesis that follows upon hubris. You lived in the cycle of the seasons, knowing yourselves mortal, and when you saw an ancient order of things broken, you mourned for it. Invaders who slaughtered, burned, and enslaved had their own orders, their own pieties. In every myth by which you lived was the warning against a reach too high, a pride too great.

"But the Faustian spirit arose. In the story, Faust bargains with the Evil One for limitless power. At the end, his soul is lost. But there is a sequel in which he returns and redeems himself, not by repentance but through attempting an engineering work that holds back the flood waters and makes them do man's bidding,

"Even so did the Faustian civilization grow away from its childhood modesty. Its mathematics went down to the infinitesimal and outward to the infinite and the transfinite. Its physics probed the atom and the stars. Its biology moved life from mystery to chemistry, and at last made the soul a process that could be downloaded. Meanwhile it conquered the world and went on to the Moon and the worlds beyond.

"It was, it is that spirit that knows no bounds, acknowledges no restraints, does what it will because it wills and then looks onward for new victories to win. ~

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"It overwhelmed all else, crushed every small shy foreignness, forged the total state, and very nearly exterminated the race."

Kenmuir lay mute for a spell, gathering his words, before he replied:

"No, I can't accept that," He could do no other than set his monkey wit against the Teramind. "You refer to what came out of Europe, Western Christendom, don't you? Well, at its worst it was never more evil than the rest, it simply had more power. And it got that power from the science it originated, which was also tiie power to end sickness and hunger, to under-stanp1 the natural world and learn how to save it. Everybody else had been destroying nature too, more gradually but without any way of ever reversing the harm. This was the civilization that abolished chattel slavery and made women the equals of men. It was the civilization—the spirit, you'd say—that gave birth to the inalienable rights of the individual, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It gave us the planets and can still give us the stars."

He had not known he could speak like that. He was no orator. What subtle forces passed through his skin to evoke whatever had been latent in him? The Teramind played fair, he thought.

"What you say is as true as what you heard," answered the voice. "Just the same, it means disunity, strife, and chaos, eternally."

"What else—what would you have?"

"Oneness. Harmony. Peace. The Noosphere, and in the end the Noocosm."

Again an apparition, a dream. Intelligence immor-tal»Jorever transcending itself, until its creations and comprehensions overmatched the whole material universe.

For billions of years to come it must explore, discover, take inspiration from that cosmos. The destinies of the galaxies were as yet incalculable. Already, though, the Law that bound them seemed clear, only its manifold unfoldings remained mysteri-546

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ous, and with every new experience the capacity to foretell the next would increase.

Timelessly perseverant, the sophotectic seed spread forth into the future. It needed no planets, no footholds, no conquests, nothing but tiny bits of substance with which to reproduce its kind.

And each of those seedbeds, each cybercosm and Teramind, was joined with the rest. At the speed of light, communication across a galaxy took tens of thousands of years, communication between galaxies took millions; but there was the patience that stems from assurance, and there was no more death.

Space expanded onward. The stars grew old. The last of them guttered out. Chill neared the absolute zero. What free energy survived trickled from the slow disintegration of black holes and the particles of matter. As slowly must intelligence spend that energy; a thought might go for a billion years before it was completed. Yet that same pace brought together the minds of the galaxies. They were now no farther apart than the duration of a thought. As the trillions of years mounted, to them their separations lessened without limit. They linked together in a single supreme intellect that filled reality. The universe was neither dead nor dark. It was alive and radiant with spirit.

Certainty is not absolute. Against our prevailing evidence and belief, the cosmos may reach an end to its expansion and fall back on itself. Intelligence will nevertheless be immortal. Within the finite time to singularity, an infinite number of events can take place, an infinity of thoughts can be thought and dreams can be dreamed. Whether the transfiguration be freezing or fiery, awareness will endure and evolve forever.

Long, long before then, its heed will have departed from the matter-energy chrysalis. It will know all things that exist and all that are possible; it will have considered them, comprehended them, and lovingly set them aside. Its own works—arts, mathematics, undertakings, unimaginable for ages to come—are

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what shall occupy its eternity. In the end was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Kenmuir lay quiet.

"You have seen the prophecy before," said the voice,

"Yes," he replied, "but never like this."

After a while: "How could ... any humans . . . threaten that?"

"This is in the nature of things. It goes deeper than chaos. If vanishingly small changes may have immense and undivinable effects, still, a system has its attractors, its underlying order, and a broken balance may well be redressed.

"To fathom the true danger, you would have to be in synnoiosis, and nonetheless your insight would be dim and fragmentary. But think. Recall what you know of quantum physics. Reality is one, but reality is a manifold. Past and future are one, inseparable. Yet this means that they are equally unknowable with precision. A particle can have gone from point to point by any of infinitely many paths; some are more probable than others, but observation alone establishes which is real. The state of one, when determined, fixes the state of another, though they be light-years apart, too distant for causality between them. Thus the observed and the observer, existence and the meaning of existence, are a whole, Yang and Yin; and the wave function of the universe shares incertitude with the wave function of a lone electron."

Kenmuir shook his head. "No, I don't see. I can't. Unless what you hint is that.. . human minds are no accident either—they're as fundamental an aspect of reality as ... as yours—" '

He shook himself. He was neither sophotect nor synnoiont, nor even a philosopher. Let it suffice him that the Teramind found reason to fear his race. (Fear? Respect? Useless words, here.) Let him stay with the grubby practicalities of flesh and blood.

"What Fm guessing your intent is," he said very 548

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carefully, "is that we humans can do anything we want, and you'll help us, advise us, be good to us—provided we stay safely irrelevant to you."

"No. That cannot be. It is already too late. Your kind is loose among the stars."

Through Kenmuir flew a horror. The Teramind might build and dispatch missiles to blast Demeter Mother before her children left their world. No! It had not happened, therefore it would not. It could not. Please.

He forced dryness: "What about us at home?" "In the future that belongs to Mind, you will join, willingly and gladly, as this I—Venator—has done, but to an immensely higher degree." "We become part of the cybercosm?" "Centuries or millennia hence. Then sentient Earth will be ready to confromt the foreign thing yonder." "You hope you'll have the strength—" the strength of intellect, not of raw force "—to cope with it. Tame it. Take it into yourself." "No. The hope is that it will join itself to us." "Would that be so hard? Is it really so different?" "Yes. As long as both remain true to their destinies, the gulf between is unbridgeable. Demeter Mother is the ancient life, organic, biological. To her, the inorganic, the machine, is no more than a lesser part, a means to the end of survival. She will always be of the material universe and its wildness, its chaos, its mortality. Never will her intellect be pure and wholly free."

Kenmuir had an eerie sense that he was a hunter closing in on a majestic quarry. "But she'll go ways that you never will, that you can never imagine, because you can't feel them. Are you afraid of that? She'll die with the stars, when you do not. Won't she? Isn't space-time big enough for you to live with her till then?"

Silence. Venator's face became like a dead man's. Kenrauir wondered what lay unspoken behind it.

No.

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Reality is one. She will shape it, as I do. It will become something unforeseeable, without destiny, something other than that Ultimate which is the purpose and meaning of me.

He threw the words away. They were nothing but his imagery, no better than a mythic image of the sun as a boat or a chariot making daily passage across heaven. He must hunt farther.

"Would Lunarians on Proserpina, matter that much?" he asked.

"Think forward," replied the oracle, and now life was again in his countenance, though it be not human life. "They will make that world over, multiply their numbers, spread among the comets, reach for the stars. They will talk with the seed of Demeter, They-will talk with their Terran kin, in whom Faust will reawaken because of it."

"They'll trouble you. You want everyone in the Solar System kept close to home where you can control us."

"Where you can enlighten yourselves and grow into sanity," said the voice. How soft it was.

Incredulous, Kenmuir exclaimed, "And this turns on a single ship escaping from the Moon? On a single man who could call her back?"

"No. Reality is a whole, I said. But for the history soon to come, and therefore conceivably for history ever after, yes, I ask that you call her back."

The cyberoosm asked.

You would make the universe into mind and harmony, Kenmuir thought. This very conflict we have been waging, not of strengths but of ideas and possibilities, betokens the etherealization you seek. Who shall hold that it is wrong, your vision? Who shall hold that passion and unsure ness, the animal and the vegetable, the mortal, grief mingled with every joy—that these are right?

Faust is forever at war. I am a man of peace.

"The choice is yours," he heard. "I may not compel.

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I cannot. For the cybercosm to impose its will by violence would be to violate itself. Nor could this bring other than chaos uncontrollable; hark back to the chronicles of all tyrannies. Though the human genus be obliterated in the Solar System, survivors would hold on at Alpha Centauri, in millennial re-vengefulness. Though they too be killed, corruption would seize the heart of the victor, and at the end would destroy it likewise. No, the burden is yours."

Beneath the nirvana imposed on his body, Kenmuir's pulse stumbled. His mouth had gone dry. "If I... obey you ... what about Aleka and her people?"

"They shall have their desire, a country better than Lilisaire can grant."

And the Earthfolk whose eyes were turned skyward would have their Habitat. None but the demonic spirit in the Lunarians must submit.

No, those humans of every kind must submit who wished for freedom. And they would not know that they had done so or that they were unfree.

It was as if his answer had lain in him since before he was born. "No."

"You refuse." It was not a question.

"I do. She shall keep flying."

"You are forgiven," said the voice, altogether gently.

Kenmuir knew he would never understand that strange integrity. He was no machine, only a man.

His consciousness toppled into nighfc

46

Have no fears," Venator had said when Kenmuir woke. "We'll flit you to Yorkport and let you go. I assume you'll catch the Luna shuttle. But first we should talk a bit, you and I."

He left the spacefarer to rest a while, then guided him to a room where they shared a plain and mostly silent meal, then provided them both with warm clothes and led the way outside. For another spell they walked wordless, until they had left the weather station out of sight behind them and were alone with the mountains.

Kenmuir breathed deeply. Thin and cold, a breeze stirred the leaves and needles of widely strewn dwarf trees. It tasted of sky. Sunlight cataracted over a long upward slope and the snowpeaks beyond. They stood knife-edge sharp against utter blue. He took the view into himself. Anxiety, indecision, sorrow were coming astir, as the dispassion laid on him in the chamber ebbed away; he needed this fresh wellspring of calm.

"Go slow," Venator advised at his side. "Spare your strength. We've time aplenty."

Kenmuir glanced at him. "What do you want of me?" he inquired.

He could not tell whether the smile that crossed the dark face was wry or regretful. "Nothing, in the sense of demands," Venator replied. "I would like to make a few suggestions, and we had better sketch out some plans."

"I'll do whatever I can," Kenmuir said awkwardly, "consistent with—" With what?

Venator nodded. "I expected you would. It's rational. But good of you, too."

How should Kenmuir respond, how should he feel?

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"Please. This is not a victor-and-vanquished situation."

Venator smiled again, more broadly and perhaps a little mockingly. "No, no."

Grit scrunched beneath boots. The wind whispered.

Plunge ahead, Kenmuir decided. "All right, then. Aleka will deliver her message." He hesitated.

"Or has she?" What hours or days had passed in the house of the Teramind?

"Not yet," Venator told him. "But she will soon."

"And you—the, the cybercosm—the government —it really won't try to suppress the news or, or any consequences that follow?"

Venator caught Kentnuir's gaze and held it a moment. "You and your friends can help us in that, you know. In fact, you must. The Federation—the humans in key positions—we don't want them led or forced into taking stands it would be hard for them to retreat from. As you guessed earlier, the less said publicly on either side, the easier for everyone concerned."

It was not a capitulation, Kenmuir realized. It was an adaptation to circumstances. It could be the first move in a new plan that extended centuries ahead. . . . No, he would not think about that. Not yet.

"I'll certainly be glad to cooperate," he said. "So will Aleka and, uh, Matthias, I'm sure."

Now Venator grinned, above raised brows. "Like Lilisaire and her Lunarians?"

"I think they'll agree."

"The story can't actually be blotted out, you know," Venator reminded. "What we can try for is that your people be discreet enough to allow mine to be the same."

No, the story could never be blotted out, Kenmuir thought. Not out of him. Pain surged. O download Dagny!

"Must we talk about opposite sides?" he asked fast. "I still can't see why the issue has to be...

irreconcilable. Are a few Lunarians in deep space such

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a big factor? How can they be, in the near future or ever?"

Venator frowned. "It seemed more clear to you before," he said. With a shrug: "It did to me too, then." He paused. "Let me propose a very crude analogy. Picture an intelligent, educated Roman in the reign of Augustus, speculating about what things would be like in another thousand years. He says to himself, 'Perhaps the legions will have marched over the whole world as they did over Gaul, and everybody everywhere will be Roman. Or perhaps, which Caesar's current policy suggests is more likely, the frontiers will stay approximately where they are, beyond them the forests and the barbarians. Or perhaps, pessimistically, Rome will have fallen and the wild folk howl in the ruins of our cities.'

"I don't know which future he chose, and it doesn't matter, because of course the outcome was none of them. A heretical oifshoot of the religion of a conquered people in one small corner of the Mediterranean lands took over both Romans and barbarians, transforming them entirely and begetting a whole new civilization."

Faustian civilization, Kenmuir thought.

"Just the same," he argued, "the sheer power of— your—cybercosm, which is bound to grow beyond anything we can conceive of—"

"The biocosm will grow too," Venator said. "And as for influences on it and on us, what may humans turn into, they and their machines, out among the comets?"

An idea struck from the rim of Kenmuir's mind. By its nature, the cybercosm must seek for absolute knowledge; but this required absolute control, no wild contingencies, nothing unforeseeable except the flowerings of its intellect. The cybercosm was totalitarian.

"Well, as events have developed, this has become yet another factor to deal with," Venator went on. "There are many more, after all, and in any case the 554

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universe will doubtless continue springing surprises for millions of years to come. Time will see who copes best, and how."

Totalitarianism need not be brutal, Kenmuir thought. It could be mild in its ways, beneficent in its actions, and . . . too subtle to be recognized for what it was.

Wings flashed overhead. He looked aloft, but the sun dazzled sight of the bird from him. A hawk, hunting? Never could he have imagined that ruthless beauty, had not a billion years of unreined chance and blind will to live shaped it for him. Suddenly he could endure remembering what had happened in the tomb on the Moon.

Maybe there would be no real affray between the Daos. Maybe in some remote age they would find they had been two faces of the same. Or maybe not. He knew simply that he was with the Mother.

"And this is rather abstract, isn't it?" Venator was saying. "We can do nothing but handle the footling details of our lifespans, one piece at a time."

Kenmuir considered him. "That isn't quite true of you, is it?"

"Not quite," Venator admitted. After several more strides through the wind: "In spite of everything, I don't envy you."

Nor I you, Kenmuir thought.

"I would nonetheless like to know you better," Venator said. "Can't be, I suppose. Shall we discuss those practicalities?"

Night had lately fallen over the Lunar Cordillera. From Lilisaire's eyrie three peaks could still b& seen far to westward, on which brightness lingered. Only the edges were visible, flame-tongues slowly dying. Elsewhere the mountains had become a wilderness of shadowy heights and abyssal darks. Eastward they dropped away to boulders and craters almost as dim. Stars stood above in their thousands, the galactic

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frost-bridge, nebulae and sister galaxies aglimmer, but Earth was no more than a blue arc along a wan disc, low above that horizon.

A clear-domed tower overlooked it all. From tanks and planters in its topmost room grew gigantic flowers. Starlit, their leaves were dark masses or delicate filigrees. Blossoms mingled perfumes in air that lay like the air of an evening at the end of summer. Fireflies flittered and glittered through their silence.

Lilisaire entered with Kenmuir. Neither had said much in the short while since he arrived. She passed among the flowers to the eastern side and stopped, gazing out. He waited, observing her profile against the sky and her hair sheening beneath it.

A song crystal lay on the ledge under the dome. She picked it up and stroked fingers across its facets. Sound awakened, trills, chimes, whistlings, a shivery beat. She made them into a melody and sang half under her breath:

"Stonefatt, firejlash,

Cenotaph of a seeker.

But the stone has lost the stars

And the stars have lost the stone."

He had heard the Lunarian words before, a snatch of a lyric by Verdea. No tongue of Earth could have keened like them or carried the full meaning behind their images.

Lilisaire laid the crystal back down and was again quiet. After a minute Kenmuir took it on himself to say in Anglo, "That's a melancholy piece, my lady."

"It suits right well," she answered tonelessly.

"I should have thought you'd be happier."

"Nay, you did not." She turned to meet his eyes. Hers seemed to brim with light. The countenance could have been the mask of an Asian Pallas. "You are intelligent. You will have priced this prize you won."

He had known he must speak plainly, but not that it

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would be so soon. The muscles tightened between his shoulderblades. He kept his voice level:

"Well, yes. At any rate, I've wondered. Proserpina is open to you, with everything that may imply." Which was what? He couldn't tell. He wouldn't live to learn. "However, the Habitat—" He left the sentence dangling, reluctant to declare what they both understood.

She completed it for him. "The Habitat is made certainty."

"It always was, wasn't it?"

She shook her head. "Not altogether, not while something in far space remained unknown, may-chance the instrument of a victory clear and complete. But now it is found."

For an instant he harked back to the house of the Teramind. Reality as discovery, mind as its maker— No, that couldn't be, not on any tangible, humanly meaningful scale, and even at the quantum level there must be more than the paradoxes of measurement; there must!

"No weapon," Lilisaire sighed. "Merely an escape."

As often in the recent past, he spun the mundane possibilities by his attention. Lunarians rebellious or adventurous—no few, either kind—would move to the iron world, piecemeal at first, later in a tide. The Federation would not oppose; it ought actually to help, because thereby both the case against the Habitat and the opposition to it should bleed away. Nevertheless, that colonizing effort would engage well-nigh the whole Lunarian spacefaring capability; and this in turn would draw folk from their homes on the inner asteroids and the outer moons. The Venture, the whole strong Lunarian presence on the planets, would fade from history.

"And a bargain of truce," Lilisaire finished.

For her part, Kenmuir thought, she could not denounce the long concealment of her ancestral treasure, and she must yield on the matter of the Habitat. Her interest in a smooth compromise was as vital as

t-

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the government's, however bad it tasted to either. A phrase from centuries agone surfaced before him. "Equality of dissatisfaction." But what when that left the great basic contest unresolved?

Carefully prosaic, he said, "Nothing is firm, you know, my lady. So far it's words exchanged between individuals and . . . sophotects. Most officials, not to mention the public, haven't heard of it, or anything about the whole affair."

"Yet I foresee the end of our Luna." Her voice was steely, devoid of self-pity; she stood straight beneath the heavens.

"No, not really—" Did he detect a flick of scorn across her lips? "A new beginning, anyhow."

"Belike a new cycle," she gave him, "albeit a stranger to everything that was ours."

No more millennial metaphysics, he decided. Aloud: "My lady, first we've years' worth of business to do. Most important to me, you made Aleka Kame a promise."

Lilisaire finger-shrugged. "Eyach, she shall have her island and its' waters. Why not? What slight power that ever I wielded in these parts is slipping from my hands." She touched her chin, frowned, then smiled a tiny, cold bit. "Moreover, to have friends on Earth may someday prove useful."

It took him a moment to catch her entire intent. "You don't want to go to Proserpina yourself, do you?"

"Nay. Why should such be my wish? Here are the holdings of my forebears and their ashes, their ancient graces and sureties, memories of them on every mountain and memories of me that would have abided. Those shall I surrender for starkness and hardship and the likelihood of early death."

"You needn't," he said around an unawaited thickness in his throat. "You can live out your life here in luxury."

Her laugh rang. It sounded real, as if he had cracked

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some Homeric joke. "Hai-ah, how comfortable the cage! How well-mannered the visitors who come to peer! And if any of them should stray too near the bars—" She shook her head. Mirth still bubbled.

"Moreover, how could I hold back from this last insolence?"

He recalled her ancestor Rinndalir, who fared to Alpha Centauri. Had Li lisa ire finally forsaken the shade of Niolente?

Seriousness struck down upon her. She stood for a span unspeaking, her look gone outward, before she said most softly, "And as for death yonder, it will be the death of a Beynac."

"Why, you, you can survive to a ripe age," he stammered.

She ignored his attempt. "I am going, and in the vanguard. But therefore I can ill keep the promise I gave you, my captain, that you would be chieftain over my emprises in space, and dwell with me as a seigneur among the Selenarchs."

"It doesn't matter."

"Ey, it does." She smiled anew. "You lie right gallantly."

In hammering bewilderment, Kenmuir groped for words. "My lady, I'm glad if I've helped you, and if I, I harmed you instead, it wasn't my wish, and—It's enough for me that I served you."

He wondered whether he meant it.

"It is not enough for me," she answered. Her hand reached forth to his. "I pray you, let me see how I can redeem my pledge a little, at least a little."

What he saw, amazed, was that she stood there as lonely and woundable as any other human creature.

The breeze was light. Aleka motored two or three kilometers from Niihau harbor before she deployed mast and sail. Then her boat ghosted along over wavelets of shining blue and green laced with glassy foam. They murmured to themselves and lapped

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against the hull. Sometimes a crest broke, briefly white. The sun declined westward. Its rays burned across the waters. Out here, though, the air was cool. A frigate bird soared on high.

Kenmuir sat on a bench in the cockpit by the cabin door, opposite Aleka, who had the tiller. She wore just a cap and a sleeveless tunic. Her skin glowed bronze, A stray lock of hair fell across her brow. He kept his face steady while he gathered courage.

She looked from the sea to him and said nearly the first words between them since they cast off.

"You've changed, lan." Her voice stayed low and he was not sure whether he glimpsed a phantom smile,

"You too, I think," he returned. "Not surprising, after what you've been through."

His mind played it over, the flight through space, the message sent, the long curve inward again, the ship and the sophotect that she wearily let rendezvous. It had not been unkind, she told him; it took her aboard and brought her back to Earth, where Venator interviewed and released her. No bodily danger ever, but she could not be confident of that, and Kenmuir dared not dwell on what she must have suffered in her spirit, amidst emptiness and machines. "I hoped you'd come right away after I got home,"

she said.

Though he sensed no reproach, he winced. "I'm sorry. Been so damnably occupied—" He had explained that before, in their short phone conversations and today when he arrived. "You'll hear the details, as far as I can straighten them out in my head. Besides, well, I thought you'd first want to rest" in her land and on her sea, among her folk and merfolk. He had wondered, without asking, if that was why she proposed they sail out to talk in private. They could have gone someplace ashore. But here she wholly

belonged. Or was it that this change of setting might break his tongue-tied hesitancy?

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Now she did smile, however tentatively. "Ah, bue-no, lawa, that's behind us. The news that we'll have our new country, we Lahui, this is what you and I can celebrate together. For openers."

He had no reply.

She watched him for a time before she said, gently as the wind, "No? No. For favor, don't misunderstand.Tm not blaming, I'm not begging."

He met her eyes. "You never would."

"Something has happened."

"Only in me."

She deserved straightforwardness. "Tm going to Proserpina," he said.

"I was . . . afraid of that."

"Don't be." It was he who pleaded. He leaned forward and caught her hand in both of his. "Listen.

It's best. You're young, you have your life and your world to make, I'm old and—"

"We could try," she said.

"And lose those years for you? No."

Her quietness abided. "Don't play unselfish. It's .unworthy of you. You're returning to Lilisaire." She drew her hand free.

"I'm trying to be realistic and, and do what's right," he said.

The waves lulled. The frigate bird cruised on watch for prey.

"This isn't a complete surprise to me," she told him. "He kanaka pono 'oe. You're a good man, an honest man. You can keep a secret but you haven't got much gift for lying." She looked to the horizon. "Don't worry about me. I'll be all right."

Yes, he knew. She was too alive for anything else.

Nevertheless—He grinned at himself, an old man's dry grin. In his expectations, she had responded fiercely, and it was not impossible that she could have lured him back to her. Well, maybe she had been feeling her doubts too. Maybe, no, probably she saw things more clearly and forthrigntly than he had known, more than he did.

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He should be relieved, not disappointed. But he was only a man.

Her concern burst over hirri: "You, though! Have you thought this through? You may well be the single Earthling—Terran—the single one of your race, away in that darkness with nothing but rocks and stars."

When she spoke thus, he gained heart. "It's space, Aleka," he replied.

She sat meditative, toying with the helm, before she said, "I see. Always it's called you, and this is the last way left for you to follow."

He lifted his shoulders and dropped them, palms outspread. "Irrational. Agreed. But we—the Lunarians, and whoever's with them—we'll bring Proserpina to life."

For whatever1 that would mean in the gigayears ahead. He felt no special involvement in them; being mortal and reasonable, he could not. Still, he would obscurely be serving Demeter Mother whom he would never know, and therewith give his life a meaning beyond itself.

That thought was more than his monkey vanity. ThejTeramind concurred. He didn't know whether it would seek to conceal the migration to Proserpina from the Centaurians. He could imagine several tricks for doing so. Certainly the cybercosm was making sure that the tale of hide-and-seek within the Solar System would be soft-played, soon lost in background noise. There must be no monuments

... It didn't matter, Kenmuir believed. In the long run, it didn't matter. When life is ready to evolve onward, it will evolve.

Aleka nodded. "You'll be in space, lan. No, I couldn't bear to bind you." A whip-flick: "As for our lady Lilisaire, I daresay you can cope with her."

"It isn't that simple."

"No."

They sailed in silence. All at once, a form broached to starboard, and another and another. A troop of the Keiki Moana were out.

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Aleka regarded them with love. "We are different breeds, aren't we, you and I?" she said at last to Kenmuir. "And we're of the same blood."

How many others might the future see?

"What you will make, right here on Earth—" he began. He broke off, filled his lungs with the clean salt wind, and went on. "I wonder if in the end it won't prove to be as strange and powerful as anything anywhere in the universe."

She laughed, low in her throat and defiantly. "The making will be fun, anyhow."

It will be joy, he hoped.

She took his hand again. "I wish you the same, darling," she said, "yonder where Kestrel is."

The little ship that had been Kyra Davis's was outbound alone, to fare forever among the stars.