The optics gleamed. How much did they note of his face and body? How much about him would the mind enter in the database, when next it reported what it observed?

For him to wear a life mask would have been an exercise in futility, as untrained as he was in it.

Worse, it would have singled him out. After that, a quick check of somatic data that were surely on file would give cause to arrest him.

His hope lay in remaining utterly undistinguished. In the sheer immensity of the databases was refuge— for a while. No matter how carefully designed a search tree was, scanning, retrieval, and evaluation took finite time. Until the hunters got a clear idea of what to seek for, their machines could spend days, weeks, among the permutations of two billion humans. Not that that would happen. Too much of the system was needed to keep civilization running.

Give this kindly being no reason to want more information about him.

"Yes. Thank you. But, uh, you mean—"

"A mayor in Bramland may command any woman to join him for as long as he chooses. It's the custom; they seldom object. In fact, it's considered an honor." Those who did object could, theoretically, catch the next airbus out of town. Theoretically. Therefore the 290

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authorities ignored the whole business. "Ordinarily, a visitor would not be bothered. Our current mayor, though—Perhaps you'd like to meet your friend somewhere else."

Kenmuir considered. Another move could by itself draw attention, the more so if Bruno took offense and started phoning around about it. "No, thank you again, but I expect we'll be all right. He won't want charges filed against him, will he? Chances are, anyway, he'll never see her." He rose.

"Good day, Officer."

"A good day to you," said the sophotect.

Jeb waited outside. Doggedly, he guided Kenmuir to the inn. Regardless, the heart rose within the spaceman. He'd made it this far. Weren't he and Aleka exaggerating their danger? What lay ahead could prove fairly straightforward, until—excitement thrummed—it brought them to whatever had been discovered and done, long ago on Luna.

22

The Mother of the Moon

From its height Temerir's observatory looked widely over the crater wilderness that is most of Farside. A low sun filled the land with intricate shadows and dun highlights. He had set the viewscreen in his living room to show that scene, not as the eye would have beheld it but with glare stopped down and lesser radiances enhanced. There the solar disc glowed soft between zodiacal wings and stars were like fire-drops flung off the tumbling Milky Way. Otherwise the room was sparsely furnished, as austere as its owner. An abstract lava sculpture on a table resembled a thick twist of smoke. The air, a little chilly, bore a tinge of ozone and subdued music on no scale ever heard on Earth. When Dagny noticed it, she thought of ghosts in flight before the wind.

Temerir had not said where his one wife and their

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children were. He alone received his guests, Brandir, Kaino, Fia, and his mother. Crystal glasses and a decanter of wine were his scanty concession to custom. Nobody cared or poured. They entered and stood unspeaking for perhaps a minute. Nor had any among them talked much on their way here in Brandir's yacht; but then crew had been present.

Dagny broke the crust. "Now can we get to business?" she asked as gently as might be. She knew full well what the business was. Sadness edged her pleasure. 'Mond should have been at her side to hear.

She put the wish from her. In six years she hadn't stopped missing him, but it was no longer so that every small thing that had been his, every place she had ever seen him, cried aloud to her.

She had dear friends, captivating work, lively recreations, a grandstand seat at humankind's ventures into the universe. From Anson Guthrie she had learned early on that self-pity is the most despicable emotion of any.

Nevertheless wistfulness touched her. "Maybe afterward we can be sociable a while?" she added. "I don't see you a lot." Nor the rest of her offspring, or their mates and children, now that Jinann was with that Voris who had been Reynaldo Fuentes. It wasn't that they were estranged or even indifferent, it was that their lives were no longer close to hers and, she believed, it seldom or never occurred to them that she might wish it were otherwise. Lars, her darling bastard, understood; but he wasn't on Luna very often.

Brandir's voice rippled at Temerir. Dagny caught that he put a question.

The astronomer cast her a pale glance and replied in English, "Yes, of course we are safe from listeners. I assured that before I called you."

Brandir's short golden-hued cloak swirled from his shoulders as he bowed. "Your pardon, lady Mother," he said. "I forgot me."

The inconsequential gesture made Dagny's eyes sting. "Oh, that, that's okay," she faltered. "I can 292

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follow Lunarian pretty well, you know, when I set my mind to the job."

"Yet not readily, nay?" blurted Kaino.

No, she thought. It was a mercury language, swift-flowing, shimmery, fluid also in its meanings, impossible for her to quite close hands on. She had borne these brains within her, but little of what was in them had passed through hers or Edmond's. "Admitted," she said. "Gracias."

From between her dark tresses, Fia frowned a bit at her brother's impetuosity. To Temerir she said, "The matter is simple for either tongue. You have found the planetoid our father foretold."

Yes, Dagny thought, at last, after these years. How long they seemed, looking back. But, true, he'd had to search on what amounted to stolen time, inventing pretexts and manufacturing their justifications. Though he ruled this place entirely, his fief from Brandir, those who worked with him and for him were not readily fooled.

She hadn't kept track of how it stretched on. Her existence had been too crowded. Personal matters, everyday jobs and joys, the occasional sorrow, a friend in need or a youthful confidence.

The growth of Lunar population, industry, undertakings, the rewards they brought and the demands they made. Her engineering administrative work for Fireball becoming entangled with the whole society around her, resources to find and allocate, conflicting plans and ambitions. Friction worsening among Moondwellers, be they Lunarians, Terrans born on Earth or in L-5, avowed Earthlings....

"I have," she heard, "if'planetoid' be the rightful word for a thing such as yonder."

"What know you for certain?" Brandir snapped.

Temerir met the gaze of the taller, more powerful man as does an equal. "That which instruments and computations can tell," he replied. "Telescopic quest brought a huge harvest for winnowing."

Yes, Dagny recalled, he could publicly mount a program to inves-THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 293

tigate the remote reaches of the Solar System, sketch-map and estimate-count the comets of the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune and the Oort Cloud beyond it. What he held to himself were certain of the results he got. "Some few appear to be asteroids, but small and rocky, not what Father meant.

When a candidate was promising, I must take what faint spectrum I could. Then, be the promise not immediately shown false, I must find occasion to send robotic probes far enough, fast enough to get a parallax. But you know of these procedures, you who are here this daycycle. In the end, one and only one body manifested the possibility."

"What is it like?" Kaino nearly shouted.

Temerir stayed ice-calm. "Seemingly akin to Father's bane, far larger. The form is spheric, diameter approximately 2000 kilometers. Much surface is overlaid with dull material, but sufficient reflects in ferrous wise to suggest that thus is the most, giving a high mean density.

The orbital inclination is a few minutes less than forty-four degrees, about the same as for the lesser object that we came to know too well. This too implies a similar composition. Perihelion is 107 astronomical units and a fraction, eccentricity is above 99 one-hundredths." Judas priest, Dagny thought, that made the aphelion point something like thirty or forty thousand a.u. out. This fitted also with 'Mond's asteroid. Oh, 'Mond, 'Mond! "At present the body is 302 astronomical units hence, spaceward bound."

She could not hold back: "What do you propose to do about it?"

"What would you, Mother?" Brandir asked. It was not a retort, she felt, it was a response. All four were looking at her with a strange—eagerness?

"It was, was kind of you to invite me," she stammered, overwhelmed. "You didn't have to."

"You knew of the search from the outset," Fia said, she maybe the most coldly practical of the brood. "You would in any case have guessed what is now afare."

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"Above that consideration," Brandir said, "we honor you."

Dagny wondered how sincere that was. How candid were they ever, even among each other?

Unworthy thought. She thrust it from her and spoke slowly. "Well, this is ... scientifically fascinating, isn't it? Gives a whole new insight into the early history of the Solar System. What a memorial to your father."

"It is raised in our hearts, which are ours only," Brandir replied.

"What do you mean?" Already she knew.

Temerir confirmed it for her: "I foreglimpsed that the thing might have immense potentialities, and hence required secrecy. Should we give it away to Earth? Nay."

"But what could you do with it?"

"We'll find out!" Kaino cried.

Temerir nodded. "If naught seems valuable, then may we set the knowledge free."

And he was the scientist of this bunch, Dagny thought. Was his generation really that alien to hers? Or that alienated?

"We shall need a shipful of robots strong and subtle," Fia said.

Brandir drew a hand slantwise through the air, a negation. An Earthling would have shaken his head. "Nay. We could not assemble and prepare that much, that costly, unbeknownst," he said. Clear before Dagny stood the fact that he had been thinking about this for a long while.

"So, a manned expedition?" flared from Kaino. "Eyach!" He threw back his head and laughed against the stars.

It happened he stood nearest to Dagny. The vision flitted through her, the contrast, those red elflocks beside the hair that hung to her shoulders. Since Edmond's death she had let it go white.

The future beside the past—

No, by damn. She wasn't yet ready for—what was

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the phrase people used in her childhood? Senior citizen. She bloody well refused to be any sniveling senior citizen. She was an old woman, and she'd soldier on as one till the Old Man came for her.

These folks had not asked her here out of pure goodness. There was something she could do for them.

"To go on trajectory would need too much time and too much supply, as noticeable as robots,"

Brandir was saying. "We shall abide until we possess a torchcraft"

That wouldn't be soon. Only lately had Dagny and her allies gotten pushed through the Federation a grudging permission for Moondwellers to buy, build, and operate spaceships with the thrust and delta v for full interplanetary service. They must do it in stages, slowly raising capital, training crew, acquiring fleet; and the earlier vessels would be relatively short-range, used for easy missions. To be sure, Brandir would hold a large share in most of the enterprises.

Kaino sprang about the room. "Come the hour, I'll recruit me a trusty gang," he jubilated.

"How will you cover the departure?" asked Fia.

They spoke as if it could be tomorrow, rather than years hence, in ardor joined with frosty calculation.

"We will give out that Temerir has identified several possible lode comets in the near Kuiper, and I am bound forth to examine them more closely," Brandir said.

A reasonable story in itself, Dagny considered. The Moon could use a bunch more water and raw organics than had yet been brought to it. Comets of suitable composition and orbit weren't plentiful. Indeed, the Federation had decided that it had done enough of that and if the Selenites wanted more they'd have to help themselves, unsubsidized. That might put their uppity noses out of joint. .. .

The surprise struck through. Fia spoke before Dagny could, brows lifted over russet eyes: "Your very self, Brandir?"

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"Yes," he said, "Since the emprise will be chiefly mine, I want a full input before I choose what we shall do afterward." His laugh purred. "Furthermore, I fear life on Luna will be flattening,"

as he achieved other goals, wealth, power, and desires more inward. "My mood will be no secret, and will help explain why men go, rather than robots. By then, sister mine, you ought to be able to manage the cityside affairs of Zamok Vysoki in my absence, under the direction of Ivala and Tuori," his wives. Evidently Fia had proven her worth in the subordinate executive position she currently occupied. It involved some tough, risky work.

And she just twenty-three, Dagny thought. But Brandir, the oldest, was just forty-one. And she, his mother, took her first job on the moon at age nineteen. (Forty-eight years ago, was that it?

Time went, time went.) Well, pioneering eras stand open to youth.

"None of this can we swiftly or easily achieve, nor by ourselves." Brandir addressed Dagny: "Again we must draw on your wisdom and your aid."

"Me?" she countered.

"None other could do so well," Kaino avowed.

"You know your way about "among both Selenites and Earthlings," Fia said. "You have the linkages to high persons and the skill to use them. Through you, we can win a cooperation from Fireball that it would not elsewise see for profitable."

"You can make sure our course toward the planetoid remains veiled," Temerir added.

"Yours is our blood," Brandir finished.

He smiled. He was beautiful.

Dared they take for granted she would turn on Earth?

No, wrong thinking. Helping Luna would be no treason to her kind. Would it? What harm to anyone

—except self-infatuated politicians, busybody bureaucrats, and magnates enriched by their franchises and monopolies—if more freedom came to these children of hers and 'Mond's?

That wasn't fair, she reminded herself. Once you

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started taking your own propaganda seriously, you were headed for fanaticism. Earth had made an enormous investment in Luna. All history shrieked how right the Federation was to dread a resurgent nationalism. The Lunarians chafed at laws written with good intent, when they did not violate them, covertly or more and more openly. Common heritage was only the most obvious sore point. Environmental concerns, weapons control, educational requirements, taxes, licenses, regulations, most of them reasonable —from the viewpoint of a civilized Earthling—but the civilization aborning here was none of Earth's, was maybe not quite human—

Wasn't it wise at least to make the cage larger, before the beast tried breaking altogether loose?

She couldn't tell. She wished she could seek counsel of Guthrie. But she was sworn to silence, and these were her children.

"Well," she sighed, "we'll talk about it."

23

LJrums boomed and thuttered. A chant pulsed among them, now organ deep, now shrill as the whistles that interwove, hai-ah-ho-hee. At the landing field the noise went low, like a distant thunderstorm, but its darkness thickened the twilight closing in.

Thunderstorm, yes, Aleka thought. Air pressed downward from the cloud deck, hot, heavy with unshed rain; her skin gleamed wet under blouse and shorts, and prickled as if from gathering electricity.

For a moment she stood beside the hired volant, unsure. Likeliest she'd leave with Kenmuir in hers, which had brought him here. But that wasn't certain. The news had been a shock when she retrieved it while approaching Overburg—negotiations suddenly broken off, Mayor Bruno calling a game against Elville, a

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government advisory not to visit the area. She might need to flit in a hurry.

"Wait here," she directed the cab. "If I haven't told you otherwise, return to your station at, oh, hour seven tomorrow."

"In view of the hazard the charge for that will be double the standard rate," the robot warned.

The debit would put quite a nick in her modest personal account. However, Lilisajre ought to reimburse eventually. Besides—her head lifted—she was playing for almighty high stakes.

"Authorized." Her voice pattern was sufficient signature. She gripped her two suitcases hard and set forth across the field.

It reached empty. When she got in among the houses, at first the sole light came from equally deserted pavement. Was everybody downtown, working up enthusiasm? Best would be to skirt that section. But she didn't know how. She had simply projected a street map from the database and memorized the most direct route to the inn. It lay beyond the square.

If only she could have talked with Kenmuir beforehand. They'd have arranged a safer meeting place, maybe an arbitrary spot in the countryside. Bueno, he had had no way of telling where she was en route. To set the communications net searching would have been to provide any hunters with a major clue. After she got the bad word, she tried to call him from the flyer. The innkeeper told her that Sr. Hannibal was out. Not knowing when to expect her, he-must have gone to eat or something.

She saw no point in leaving a message. On her second attempt, nobody replied. By then she was so close that she decided to go ahead with tfte original plan.

Rightly or wrongly. Probably there was no real danger. She stepped onward. Gloom canopied the buildings and crouched between them. Ahead, though, light strengthened wavery over the rooftops.

Drums, whistles, song, stamping feet grew louder, till the racket beat in her marrow.

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The street ended at a large edifice, a pile of night. She turned left, then right at its edge, hoping to stay clear of the crowd without getting lost. Unfamiliarity tricked her. All at once she came forth into the next street and found she was at a corner of the square diagonally across it.

The spectacle jarred her to a halt.

At the center flared a bonfire, flames roaring three meters aloft, smoke washed red with their glare. Around it danced the young men, stripped to the waist, shining with sweat. They waved knives and staves, they ululated, their faces were stretched out of shape with passion. At the corners squatted the drummers and whistlers. Along the right side clustered the women, children, and elderly, a shadowy jumble wherein firelight glistened off eyeballs. Their keening wove like needles through the male chant. "Ee-ya, ho-ah, hai-ah, ho!"

Through Aleka whirled recollections of ceremonies at home, solemn or merry, cheering at sports events, and a police parade. This too was human.

Better get away. Fast.

A hand clamped on her shoulder. In her amazement she had not noticed anyone behind her. "Who you?

What you doin' here?"

The man was gray and portly, unfit for campaign, but his muscles were still big and he carried a knobbed staff as well as a dagger. Yes, she realized, a few guards would be posted, even in this dement hour. "P-por favor," she choked, "I'm a, a visitor. Bound for your inn."

"Ungn? Spy, mebbe. We see. Come." He took hold of her arm and wrenched. Biting back fear and anger, she obeyed. They skirted the left side of the square.

A man came dancing solitary down that street. He was swathed in a knee-length hooded coat. As he passed, Aleka saw by the veined hands and withered face that he was aged beyond any further help from biotech. Then she saw that his coat was identical front and rear, and that on the back of his head he wore a

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mask of himself as a young man. That face bore the same blind ecstasy. He jerked his way on out of her sight. She wondered what magic he was working.

The guard took her up the stairs of a big, grotesquely colonnaded building. On the porch stood several men, also old but as richly attired as the four young women with them. At the middle hulked another man, in the prime of life, huge and shaggy-blond, a horned fillet and a gold chain declaring his rank. Beside him, a table held a jug and goblet. He was taking a long draught.

Gazes went from the warriors to the newcomers. The guard bent a knee and dipped his staff.

"'Scuse, senorissimo," he said through the noise. "I caught this here moo over yonder. Dunno who she is or wha' she wants."

"Yah?" growled the giant.

Aleka mustered resolve. "Are you the mayor, se-nor?" she asked as calmly as she was able. "My respects. I didn't mean any harm or, or qffense or anything. I just came to meet another visitor here. Nobody was at the airfield, so all I could do was make for the inn where he is."

"Ah-h. Yah. That there Hannibal, huh?"

"Yes. He messaged that he'd gotten permission for me."

"I know. Yuh." The mayor's glance slithered up and down and across her. He grinned. "Yuh, sure.

You goin' to the inn, um? Awright. Stay there. I can't leave yet, but I'll see y* later. Stay, y'

hear?" To the guard: "Follow 'long, Bolly, an' watch t' make sure they stay inside."

Unease quickened. "Why, sefior?" Aleka protested. "I assure you, we're only transients, we have nothing to do with—"

A slab of a hand chopped air. "I know. I wanna talk wi' you, tha's all. Move on. Don't hurt her none, Bolly, long's she behaves. You got me? Awright, move on.

Evidently the mayor's part in the celebration must

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not be interrupted any more than necessary. The guardsman led Aleka back down the stairs. He had released his grip, but sullen silence told how he resented being posted away from the fun. She suspected he would have found ways to take it out on her except for his orders. The database had said the chief enforced an absolute governance, personally and brutally.

But it was limited to his subjects, who could always leave, she told herself. It existed on sufferance. Unless he was a total fool, he wouldn't provoke national intervention.

Still, relief streamed through her when the escort stopped and mumbled, "Here y' are. Go on, get inside." He hunkered down on the grass by the steps and brooded on his wrongs.

The hostel was an ordinary-looking house, not much more sizable than average. A single window showed light from the second floor. An entryroom was illuminated but empty. When the hinged door had shut, quietness drew in on Aleka. Dust, a few pieces of weary furniture, a musty smell—no robots, then; two or three humans in charge. A role for them to play. Tonight they were playing another and frenzied one. However, that shining window—Her blood thrilled. Baggage or no, she ran upstairs.

Doors lined a corridor. They lacked any kind of scanners or annunciators. Mentally orienting herself and recalling historical shows, she chose which to knock on. It opened, and the sight of Kenmuir's simpatico face set her spirit free. "Aloha, aloha," she gasped.

"You!" he exclaimed. "Cosmos, but you're welcome. Come in, do." He took her suitcases and secured the door behind her.

The room was about four meters square, with an attached bath cubicle and a woven carpet underfoot.

It possessed neither phone nor multi. A bed, a dresser, and two chairs were as primitive in workmanship as in design. The sash window was another anachronism, 302

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full of the night that had fallen. Kenmuir shut it against the sounds, to which he must have been listening, and turned on the air cycle. Coolness blew sweet into an atmosphere that had begun to stifle her.

He took both her hands. "How are you?" he asked anxiously. "I've been so worried since this trouble broke. I was hoping you'd sheer off and post a new message for me."

"I thought of it, but that would've cost more time and I don't know how much we can afford," she explained. "Maybe I should've. Too late now."

He sensed the grimness. "What do you mean?"

She told him about her arrival. He scowled, paced to and fro, shook his lean head. "Let's hope Bruno has nothing more in mind than a bit of farewell sociability, to show off his importance."

"What else might it be?" she asked with a flutter in her throat.

"I... can't say. Of course, he can't detain us, or anything like that. We can point out the legal consequences of trying. I'm afraid that ruffian outside is too stupid to understand, and we could end with a broken bone or two. But Bruno—I've come to know him a little, this past couple of days.

He's been . .. cordial, in his clumsy way. Eager to impress me, the man from the wide world.

Cultural inferiority complex, I think, fuelling a lot of the bluster and violence." Kenmuir's tone had gone scholarly. He curbed it and his unrest. A laugh rattled out. "But I say, what kind of host am I? Do sit down, or lie down if you'd rather. Would you care for a drink? I acquired a bottle of whisky."

Aleka took a chair and smiled up at him. "Gracias. Plenty of water in it, por favor. Don't worry about me. I've been through far worse. This was unpleasant but short, and I've already bounced back."

Charging the tumblers, he regarded her and said slowly, "Yes, you are an adventurous lass, aren't you? A great deal to tell me, I'll wager. Well, we've hours to wait, and we can talk freely. This room is one place—

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one of the very few places on Earth—we can feel sure there's no surveillance."

"We do need to talk," she agreed.

He gave her her drink, pulled the other chair close, and fofded himself onto it. Tenser than she, he took a stiff swallow before he began: "Who are you, Aleka? What are you doing in this affair, and why?"

"I'd like to know you better, too, Kenmuir."

"But you've been briefed about me. Haven't you? While to me you're a complete mystery."

She couldn't help grinning. "Woman of mystery? That'll be news to all my folk. How do I go about it? Should I put on a foreign accent, or find me a low-cut gown, or what? No, that's Lilisaire's department."

His lips tightened for a moment. Did she see him wince? She remembered what had been in his eyes when they spoke with the Selenarch from that furnace enclosure in the desert. Sympathy welled forth. By every evidence, he was a decent man, a quiet man, pitched into a situation for which he was no more fitted than a Keiki was to climb a mountain, yet going bravely ahead, without even the hope that drove her.

She gentled her voice. "I'm sorry. Don't want to play games with you. Go on, ask what you want.

I'll answer anything that's not too personal,"

He flushed. "I... wouldn't dream of intruding on your privacy." So he valued his own. "But as for your background and, and your motivation—"

Time lost itself in memories. He had a gift of evoking them from her, she couldn't quite tell how, the shy smile or the questions that could be awkwardly phrased but were always intelligent or the bits of his years and dreams that he offered in return. She believed that little by little he came to some knowledge of her Lahui Kuikawa, the two races of it that she both loved, small dear homes enfolded by immensities of sea and weather, ancient usages and youthful joys, a life with a meaning and purpose that went beyond itself, which no machine could share but 304

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which the world of the machines and their followers was going to confine and make over.... "Oh, I can admit the necessity, even the justice of it," she said, and blinked furiously at her tears,

"but give us a while yet, give us a chance to find a new way for ourselves!" . . . She wasn't sure whether she would ever fully imagine his feelings. Though he had gone in pride among splendors, the faring seemed harsh and lonely. But he held her to him, briefly and tenderly, when grief was about to overwhelm her, and it receded.

He deserved better than Lilisaire.

The time came when they sat quiet, until he asked, "And what did she promise you, if somehow this crazy venture succeeds?" His tone was calm, with a hint of the academic style that he often fell into. His mouth creased slightly upward.

Doubts shivered away to naught. She straightened in her chair and cried, "A home!"

"Where? How?"

"Nauru." His glance inquired. Words spilled from her. "No, I don't expect you've heard of it. An island in mid-Pacific, barely south of the equator, northeast of the Solomons. It was a nation once, tiny but rich, because it had plenty of phosphate to export. But that got used up," before molecular technology had bridled the voracity of global industry. "The population, ten thousand or so, tried to build a new economic foundation, but didn't really succeed and became poorer and poorer. When Fireball offered to buy them out at a good price, they were happy to accept and move away. Guthrie had an idea of building another spaceport there. But things went to wrack and ruin on Earth, what with the Renewal and the Grand Jihad and all; and when they were starting to make sense again, Guthrie died, and it was a while before his download had full control over the company; and by then, so much space activity was based in space itself that a new Earthside port wouldn't pay. Eventually Fireball sold Nauru to Brandir of Zamok Vysoki. That was in the early days of Lunar independence.

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Several Selenarchs had gotten superwealthy and were looking for investments. They picked up a fair amount of property on Earth, including real estate. Some of it is still in their families."

"This island being Lilisaire's, eh?" Kenmuir murmured. "What has she done with it?"

"Nothing much. Fishery and aquaculture, maintained by robots and a few resident Terrans. Not especially profitable. But you see, it was always important to have people there, if only a handful. Because technically, Nauru is still a distinct country."

Keninuir's eyes widened. "I think I do see." He chuckled. "I'd love to know what maneuvers Guthrie went through to arrange it. Wily old deyil."

Aleka nodded vigorously. "That was the idea. The Ecuadoran and Australian governments were cooperative with Fireball, but if he could have his very own—Bueno, as I said, it didn't work out.

The Selenarch owners used it as a way of getting a kept politician into the Federation Assembly, but it never did them any noticeable good. And now—" She caught her breath.

"A-a-ah. You shall have it for your people."

"Yes. An atoll, with a couple of big float platforms to add some area. But more than a quarter million square kilometers of territorial waters. And the neighbor states, they long since granted rights in theirs to Nauru, on a basis of mutuality that they don't take advantage of any more.

"Oh, yes, we'll have to abide by environmental rules under the Covenant. But they're flexible enough when ... we are the local supervisors . . . and we do want to bring our Keiki into balance with nature, it's just that we can't do it without destroying what we are unless we have time and elbow room and... freedom—" She couldn't go on.

She had not yet been there in person, but before her rose the vision she conjured out of the database. Nauru was not Niihau. It lay solitary, 200 square kilometers, a plateau scarred by the former mining,

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walled by coral cliffs, ringed by sandy beaches and the outlying reef, a wilderness where remnants of dwellings stood desolate under the sea wind and the screaming sea birds, the only habitation a few cabins. But trees swayed in that wind, flowers glowed, in the southwest was a freshwater lagoon, everywhere around reached the living sea. The English had named it Pleasant Island.

"What we can make of it," she whispered after a minute.

"I daresay the deal will raise an uproar in Hiroshima." Kenmuir stroked his chin. "But, hm, I'd guess you can plead your case on more than legalistic grounds. Popular sentiment will favor a cause that romantic. Also, not least, because you'll be taking the country out of Lunarian hands, back into Earthlings'. Yes, the prospects look good to me."

His dryness was just what she needed. Had he known? Aleka settled into reality. "First," she said,

"we've got to carry out our mission, and hope the result will seem worth it to Lilisaire."

His countenance drew into furrows. "Right. We do." Then: "What exactly is your plan?"

"The plan I was given, actually," she replied, "and there's nothing exact about it, only a briefing on what to expect and a suggestion or two about how to proceed. We can try something different if we choose. But this does strike me as our best bet. Does the name Prajnaloka mean anything to you?"

"No-o. ... Wait. Some kind of cult or fellowship?"

"Stranger than that. I hardly knew of the movement myself till the agent in San Francisco told me.

Later, before going to meet you, I retrieved more details. It's worldwide, though it hasn't many members, and its name depends on the language—in Anglo, it's Soulquest. Prajnaloka is the center for North America, a settlement in the Ozark Mountains, not far east of here. For our purposes, it's got superb data facilities, and they often get used in such peculiar ways that we can hope the system won't look closely if we—"

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A knock crashed on the door, again and again. Aleka and Kenmuir jumped to their feet. For a terrible half second, she felt this must be their enemy, who had no face. Then she thought to see what the time was. She hadn't noticed how the hours slipped away, noise and flicker from the square died out, the night grew old.

"Bruno," Kenmuir said. He walked stiffly over to unbolt the door and open it.

The mayor's bulk filled the frame. Aleka glimpsed the guardsman Bolly behind him. "Good evening,"

Kenmuir greeted. "Or I could better say, 'Good morning.'"

"Good, yah, good," Bruno replied slurrily. His face was flushed, he breathed hoarsely, but he advanced with iron steadiness. Kenmuir must step aside. Bruno's gaze sought Aleka and clung. "Ho, th' li'l lady," he boomed. "B'env'ida." He approached, stopped, laid hands on her shoulders.

"Happy here?"

She slipped from her chair and his touch. He came after her and loomed. Sweat and drink swamped her nostrils.

"Not happy, huh? Yah, stuck in this room. No fun. Sorry. For y' own safety. Things got kin' o'

wild. Quiet now. Come on out V I'll show you our fair city. You'll like it."

She would not let her voice tremble. "Gracias, but I'm afraid we must go. Urgent business."

"Naw. Not that urgent. Later t'day. When I start off for th' game. First, fun." Again his hands were upon her, enclosing her hips, sliding up to her breasts. "Come on wi' me. You'll like it."

She writhed free. He grabbed her wrist, bruisingly } hard. Through nausea she heard Kenmuir: "I say, this won't do. Let her go."

Bruno glared at him. "Huh? You gimme orders? You?" Bolly growled in the doorway and hefted his weapon.

"Please let us go," Kenmuir clipped.

"Why?"

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"You have no right to keep us. You're being abusive. Have a care, sir, or you'll be under criminal charges."

Bruno tugged Aleka against his belly. She submitted. At least in this position he couldn't fondle her. "I'm not hurtin' nobody," he said, and farted. "Jus' gonna pleasure the li'l lady. Like she never been pleasured before."

"You're drunk."

Monumentally drunk, Aleka thought. Unless it was mostly the hysteria of the war dance still upon him. She could not stop a shudder.

"Shaddup!" he bawled. "Shaddup 'fore I shut you up wi' y'r teeth!" Aleka felt him slacken a bit.

The hair around the lips scratched her cheek. He laughed. "You were ready enough t' enjoy a woman o' mine yestiddy. My turn."

"I warn you," Kenmuir stated, "if you don't release her this minute, you'll soon be under arrest.

What then is your glory worth?"

Was that the wrong thing to say? Did it egg the creature past every border of reason? Bruno spat on the floor. "That fr you!" he roared. Chortling: "Naw, no force. She'll like it, I tell you.

You'll beg me for more, li'l girl. You'll wanna stay here. C'mon." He forced her around, her arm still in his grasp and twisted behind her back. "Bolly," he commanded, "make sure this yort don't give no trouble. Got me?"

"Yah, senorissimo," replied the guard happily. *

Kenmuir ignored him, strode to stand in the doorway, and said to Bruno, "Very well, sir, you leave me no choice. I challenge you."

"What?" The mayor jarred to a halt.

"We'll settle between us who has the authority," Kenmuir told him.

Bolly raised his staff. "Hey, you can't talk t' him like that," he rasped.

"Is the mayor afraid to fight me?" Kenmuir retorted.

"No!" Aleka screamed out of nightmare. "Don't!

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You can't—" The giant would pluck the slender middle-aged man apart. And then what recourse would be left? Both she and Kenmuir could disappear, permanently, and nobody else ever know what had become of them. "I'll go along. I will." And maybe later she could call on the law. Or maybe Bruno would wake up dead.

"You're loco," he was coughing.

"No," Kenmuir answered. "I simply challenge you to meet me, bare-handed. If you aren't man enough, let your follower here so inform the people."

Bruno bellowed.

And somehow, in a rush and clatter, they all got downstairs, out into the street. Bruno sprang backward and took stance, a monster blot on the pavement luminance. A breeze had arisen, sighing between darkened walls. Lightning had begun to flicker above roofs to the west. Bolly stood aside.

He held Aleka by the wrist, not too tightly, and she saw a dull bemuse-ment on him. Kenmuir patted her hand, a moth-wing touch, before he chose a position for-himself. O Pele, how slight were his bones!

Maybe Bruno would be content to disable him, rape her, and release them. Not likely. Sober, he'd think of the aftermath. Aleka glanced skyward. Maybe Lilisaire would track down what had happened and avenge them.

Bruno charged. Kenmuir waited. Bruno reached him, twirled, launched a karate kick.

Kenmuir's forearm slashed. The leg went aside. Bruno tottered, off balance. Kenmuir's foot took him behind the knee. He howled and crashed.

Kenmuir sprang after him and gave him a heel in the torso. He gasped, but rolled clear and bounded up again. Incredible strength, Aleka realized. Let him close in, and he would smash his opponent as a maul breaks a cup.

He must have been a little dazed, though. Fists doubled, he struck for the stomach. Instantly Aleka

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saw the mistake. Kenmuir's hand darted like a knife to block the arm, which punched air. His shin made a sweep, and the mayor went back down.

Or so it seemed. Aleka had never studied combat. Her sports were gentle. She saw mostly a savage confusion.

Bruno tried once more, failed once more, groaned and shook. Blood smeared his face, matted his beard, dripped onto the street to shine luridly red. With an animal noise, he drew his knife. "No, can't!" wailed Bolly. Bruno lurched to attack. Kenmuir captured the wrist with his right hand, stepped in sideways, and as he moved smashed an elbow to the neck. The knife clattered free. Bruno became a bag of flesh that lay on the pavement and fought for air.

Kenmuir walked over to Bolly. Sweat sheened on his visage. He breathed deeply and his smell was—

powerful, male, Aleka thought as dizziness rushed through her head. Yet his movements were easy and his words calm. "I believe that takes care of the matter. Release the woman."

Bolly did. He stared and stared.

"I'll take that stick of yours, if you please," Kenmuir said. He plucked it from unresisting fingers. "I'm not interested in anything else hereabouts, of course. Why don't you help your master?" To Aleka: "Can you fetch our luggage?"

She could. She did. Not until she returned did she understand, clear-minded once more, that they were free.

Kenmuir had been talking further to the guard, who crouched over the fallen and pawed unskiUruUy.

Aleka arrived in time to see the staff twirl. Kenmuir must have demonstrated he could use it, too, if need be. He nodded at her and took his suitcase. "Let's be on our way," he said.

His pace was brisk but not hasty. Not to show fear, Aleka realized. Their escape depended on an emotional equilibrium that could break at any instant.

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The walk to the airfield went on and on. Wind moaned, lightning blinked, thunder muttered.

—They were in her volant and airborne.

Uncontrollable shivering seized her. He held her close, stroked her hair, murmured. At last she could sit beside him and whisper, *Tm sorry. That was ch-childish."

"Not at all," he replied. "A very natural reaction. You were in trouble more foul than I was, and stayed in charge of yourself. That always carries a price."

She glanced at him. By now they were above the clouds. His profile was etched against a sky going pale and the last few stars. "You don't seem shook up," she said low.

He turned to smile at her. "Oh, I am. Exhausted. Let's stop over somewhere and sleep the sun down."

Her body ached, but the clarity within had come back, sharper still. "No, better not. Every place we could be noticed is an extra danger. Have the flyer cruise around a few hours while we rest, then make straight for Prajnaloka."

He slapped his forehead. "Q! You're right. The Overburg service sophotect will hear of the set-to, investigate, report; and it's met me, we talked." That brain could project the moving, speaking image of him into the database.

At least it had not seen her. By lucky chance—some luck was about due, Aleka thought—she had given her name to nobody in the town. True, it would come to light that a second outsider had been there. After that, a check with Traffic Control could reveal that the vehicle had been hers, and its present whereabouts.

But why should the authorities take that kind of trouble over an incident with no particular consequences, in a society that as a matter of policy was pretty much left to itself? They didn't know that a few among them were covertly hunting Kenmuir. They'd have no reason of their own to track him down. If he wanted to file charges, he'd call them; otherwise, it 312

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was logical just to leave what the sophotect related in the file. Maybe in due course that file would hold enough entries of this kind to make them take a closer look at Bramland. Aleka hoped so. But it wouldn't likely happen soon.

Her companion was smiling again, with what she guessed was an effort, and adding, "You see, you are in full command of your wits."

"You—" she marveled, "when you challenged him, I thought you were—pupule—crazy, suicidal."

He shrugged. "Spacers have to spend a great deal of time exercising, if they're to stay fit.

Martial arts are a favorite program of mine. When I'm alone, I work against a generated image, which does wonders for developing the reflexes. Not that I ever expected to use them violently, but I've-done fairly well in competitions. Bruno's knowledge is rudimentary. I'd ascertained that in conversation." Just in case he might find need for the knowledge, Aleka decided. A forethoughtful man. "Besides, he was drunk. I had no serious worry.

"He was stupid from the beginning, when he tried to kick. That's powerful but slow, and by itself it leaves you open to several different counterattacks. My problem was simply to keep him at a distance, unable to grapple or land a real blow, while I demolished him. And, yes, I had to try not to kill him, especially when under the circumstances that could well have been irreversible."

Kenmuir grimaced. "Hateful. The arts had never been anything to me but exercise and recreation. I never wanted them to be anything else." He sighed. "Well, 1 don't imagine Bruno has suffered permanent damage, other than to his ego and perhaps his social position."

She laid her hand over his. "Just the same, you were wonderful," she said.

"I couldn't have stood by. Could I? The more so when I was—not responsible for the mess, but a, a factor in it."

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"You did accept his hospitality pretty, uh, thoroughly, didn't you?"

At once she knew the remark was illogical, unfair, something that slipped free before she in her exhaustion saw it coming. He looked away. "I didn't know how I could well refuse," he mumbled.

"I'm sorry!" she blurted. "None of my damn business."

Although . . . had he enjoyed it?

"Shall we try to sleep?" he proposed.

Still calm, still judicious, still the captain. Why should she vaguely resent that? Better be glad she had such a man at her side. Were there many spacers like him? (No, spacers were few, few, and most of them Lunarians.) How much of him was not inborn but was Fireball, ideals, rites, trothdom, a tradition as old as its Guthrie House?

24

The Mother of the Moon

In summer the little Rydberg fleet lay at its dock when not in use, a ketch, a ten-seater hydrofoil, a dinghy for knocking about in the sheltering cove. Winter's boathouse stood to one side. Behind it were an airstrip and a hangar that could accommodate three flitters. Lawn and flowerbeds led up to the dwelling. Stone-built, slate-roofed, it did not dominate the grounds with its size: for at its back the land rose beneath old fir forest, while westward the ocean swept across a fifth of the planet.

On this day a north wind blew strong. The treetops tossed and rustled with it, waves ran upward and inland through their murkiness, a hawk rode above the high horizon they made. Clouds flew in tatters, brilliant against the sun, gray when they passed over it and their shadows scythed below them. The sea ran steely in the distance, white and green where it roared 314

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into surf. Chop on the cove threw sunlight back and forth, blink-blink-blink, while boats rocked and their mooring lines creaked. Warmth still lay in the earth, but a chill went through the air, harbinger of autumn.

The flitter landed neatly. Lars and Ulla Rydberg waited nearby. They were clad much alike, in tunic and trousers over which they hugged cloaks. The wind fluttered stray locks of hair, his whitening blond, hers wheat-gold. The flitter door opened. A robot climbed out. It was a small multipurpose model, four legs under a cylinder which supported a control turret; two arms ended in hands, two in attachments for various tools. The optics in the turret gleamed about 130

centimeters above the ground. Ordinarily the computer inside would have been a neural net adequate for manual tasks that were not too demanding. This unit had been modified to hold a download.

The voice that rolled from it was Anson Guthrie's: "Hola! Good seeing you again."

"Welcome—" Ulla hesitated for an instant "— jefe." The honorific did not yet come quite naturally to her. She had only been Fireball for seven years, mainly by virtue of her marriage, and resident in North America for three; the English she learned in Europe was not Hispanicized; her direct contacts with him had thus far been comparatively few and brief. "You honor us." That was meant for courtesy. She was a big, bluff, handsome woman, no sycophant.

"Gracias." Guthrie must have been scanning the scene. "Uh, aren't your kids here? I'd've thought they'd come on the gallop, except the baby, and she'd crank up her buggy to full speed."

"We sent them off on an outing, together with Sefiora Turner," Rydberg explained. He referred to the single assistant he and his wife needed, aside from machines, to run house and household comfortably. "When you called, you gave me to understand you wanted a confidential meeting."

"Oh, not that hush-hush," Guthrie said, shaking hands. "We could go for a sail or a walk in the THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 315

woods—I'd enjoy that—or just close the door to a room for a couple of hours. The reason I came in person, instead of squirting my image through the usual code, was that I'd like to be with you for a short spell."

His tone was matter-of-fact. It generally had been too when Ulla saw the simulation of living Guthrie in her phone screen. Sometimes, though, it had gone soft, and the face had crinkled into a big grin, as when she showed him her children. "Stay as long as you want," she told him. "Oh, please!"

"'Fraid that can only be overnight, querida. Too flinkin' much to do. Also, if I was absent any length of time without carefully arranging it beforehand, the news pests would go into a feeding frenzy. I'm in this dinky body just so's I could sneak off without them noticing. Give me a rain check for a proper visit sometime, okay?"

Lars smiled, a little stiffly. "Do you need one, for your own house?" he said. "We can take that walk now if you wish."

"Aw, we might as well go inside. I've looked forward to poking around the old place on my personal feet."

The house where mortal Guthrie spent his last years, and where he died.

Until then he had kept in touch with his great-grandson, especially after Lars was told of the kinship. It was never made public, and Guthrie never showed favoritism to him. In fact, they spoke less often than either did with Dagny Beynac. Yet theirs was a genuine bond.

The download continued it, and it strengthened after Lars perforce retired from piloting.

Groundside, his experience soon joined with administrative talents he had not known he possessed, to make him more important—above all, to Fireball's exploratory ventures—than ever when he ranged the Solar System.

Their images, the real and the synthetic, had chat-

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ted one evening in Stockholm, afternoon in Quito. "I gather you and your wife want to move,"

Guthrie said. "May I ask how come?"

"We grow restless," Lars answered. "I have found Europe is as I remembered. Too . . . too tame, everything too controlled. And if space, for me, will be no more than visits to Luna or L-5, well, then I would rather haveuhe true Earth around me, Old Earth, as nearly as possible. Ulla agrees.

She grew up in Lapland, a forest girl." He paused. "Besides, we want a big family. That is frowned on here, you know, and heavily taxed. Already we have social problems. We think of North America."

"Um-m, it's a fairly free country these days, yeah. Dunno how long it'll stay that way."

"Oh? Why?"

"The Renewal pretty well destroyed its middle class. The Second Republic is tinkering too much, trying too hard to restore a productive society and bring the underclass into it, by actions from above, instead of letting people alone to heal things for themselves." Guthne projected a shrug.

"But liberty ought to last a while yet. And whether it does or no, our company communities should stay autonomous, in fact if not in name."

"Jefe, I said we would like nature around us, Northern nature, not an enclave. Most of the time, anyhow."

"Hm-m . . . Hey, an idea! Listen, I once bought myself a beautiful preserve on Vancouver. Island, Pacific Northwest, built a big house, spent as much time there as I could wangle. The poor thing's stood empty ever since, aside from a caretaker. I bet it'd love some clatter and chaos."

Lars stared. "What? But this is—is—"

"If you find you like it, I'll make it over to Fireball and you the trustee, with the right to bequeath your position. It's isolated, but a short hop by air to Victoria or Vancouver, not a lot longer by fast boat. The kids can go to school, call on their friends or THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 317

invite 'em over, as often as you can stand. The winters are no worse than Sweden; or you can spend them in a southerly clime. Think about it, talk with your wife, make an inspection trip, let me know at your convenience. I hope you'll give it a try."

"This is, is very sudden."

"When factors click together for me, I don't stall around." Guthrie's created gaze gentled. "Keep things in the family, as near as may be, hm?"

Going up the path to the verandah, he remarked, "I'm glad to see how well you maintain things. You still like the place?"

"Oh, yes," Ulla said passionately.

"So do quite a few of our consortes, I hear. Don't you ever get tired of all those house guests?"

"No, no, they are friends. And it is good for the children to meet such different kinds of people, not in a screen but here, alive."

"And they bring space home to us in a way that recordings, writings, nothing else can do." Wistfulness tinged Lars's voice.

"I understand," said Guthrie quietly.

"Business as well as pleasure," Ulla continued. "It is necessary to know everything one can, when so much is always unknown. The house is becoming a center for informal, rank-free conferences—But why am I telling you?"

"Because you're feeling a tad nervous, ma'am. Don't. This is not the boss coming to dinner."

Guthrie laughed. "Absolutely not." In seriousness: "Lars and I are closer than you realize. I think the time's ripe, you've proved you are reliable, for you to learn how close that is. But first, what I've mainly come about, I ask for your help."

"Whatever we can do!"

They mounted the steps, crossed to the door, opened it, and passed through into the vestibule. A cloud left the sun. The colors in a window blazed, Daedalus and Icarus a flight.

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Cloaks removed, Lars led the way to a room whose ceiling was the roof itself, beams two stories above a parquet floor, oak wainscots, stone fireplace where logs were burning. Light fell soft upon furniture ancient and massive, thick carpet and drapes, paintings from centuries ago, wrought brass and silver. Smetana's "Moldau" flowed out of speakers. The robot entered like a spider into a sanctuary.

"Shall we talk here?" Lars proposed.

"Okay," Guthrie said. "I see you haven't changed anything to speak of. Do by all means, if you want. Isn't the d6cor kind of heavy for you?"

"No, no," Lars replied. "We have felt free to adapt the rest of the house, but this—it feels right as it is."

"Not a shrine," Ulla added. "We use it, it is the center of our home. But it is also like a heart or a root, not only for us but for Fireball." •

Neither of them mentioned the other unaltered chamber, the one where Guthrie died.

"Can we ... offer you anything, sir?" she went on, suddenly awkward.

"Just your company," Guthrie answered. "Wit and wisdom, or whatever else you've got in stock.

Look, por favor, relax. Pour a Scotch or coffee or something, put your feet up, let's be our plain selves."

He guided them for a while through gossip and minor affairs: what had lately happened in the Hawaiian compound where the Rydbergs spent some of their winters; their recent vacation in L-5, the burgeoning arts and amusements of variable weight; a carefully unpublicized comic incident at Weinbaum Station on Mars; mining operations on Elara, Jupiter XI; the new Lake Aldrin park in Luna—

"It is about Luna, is it not?" Lars asked. "Why you have come."

By then he sat beside Ulla, a glass in his hand, a cup in hers. Guthrie faced them, standing before the hearth. Firelight shimmered on the metal of him. Words moved readily.

"Yeah," he said. "I daresay you guessed right away THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 319

when I called about getting together." Lars nodded. "After all, Dagny Beynac is your mother."

"And virtually coequal with the governor general," Ulla observed.

"Not legally," Lars reminded her. "She has no official position these days, aside from her berth in Fireball."

"The much greater her power."

"You're a wise lady," Guthrie said. "She's only half concerned about Fireball these days."

Shocked by the outspokenness, Lars exclaimed, "She would never break troth!"

"I didn't say that. Of course not. On the contrary, you know how since her supposed retirement she's stayed on tap as a consultant for us, but maybe you don't know just how badly the outfit would hate to lose her advice."

Guthrie fell silent for a span before he resumed, "However, like everything else human, 'troth'

can be taken in a number of different ways."

Lars went defensive. "Please, what do you mean by that?"

"Nothing bad. She doesn't figure Fireball can be hurt by her Lunarians getting more of what they want, mainly home rule and scope for action. She claims we'd benefit. But she is more and more involved with the effort to get it for them." Guthrie made a sigh. "As a result, we're no longer as close as we used to be, we two."

"Since—" Ulla broke off.

"Since my original cashed in his chips and I took over?" Guthrie replied. "Don't be afraid to say it. Sure, that was bound to change the relationship, but it did less'n you might have expected. In the last several years, though, she's—well, she's gotten out of the way of sharing with me everything that's big on her mind."

"She grows old," Ulla said low. "People change with age."

"Hard to imagine her old. I remember her like yesterday, a little curiytop—" Guthrie stopped. That 320

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was not quite his yesterday. "But no. Time has only honed Dagny Beynac sharper."

"Then what is worrying you, jefe?" Lars inquired.

"That calls for a review of the background," Again Guthrie paused. "Look, you're both well aware of how, ever since they got leave to, Lunarians have been making a strong push to get into deep space on their own hook. Her sons are at the forefront. Purchase, manufacture, training—small-scale stuff to date, but energetic and ambitious."

"Yes," Lars mused.."Ambitious. An ambition that puzzles me, I confess. It isn't really economic.

We have never—Fireball doesn't want to suppress them, for God's sake. But when I try to persuade them that at this stage, chartering vessels and hiring out jobs is better—they are polite, but it is as if they do not hear."

"Your experience isn't unique," Guthrie said dryly.

"I have told you, dear," UHa recalled to her husband. "This is a matter of pride, self-assertion.

When will you learn that not everybody is as rational as you are?"

Guthrie laughed once more. "The besetting irrationality of rationalists. You're right, my lady.

I'm doubtful what is and is not rational to a Lunarian, that wild-ass breed, but basically you're right.

"Okay, let 'em go ahead. There's sure no dearth of things to do in space, even if the rich Lunarians have to subsidize their part of it. But—you wouldn't know, you two, because it was between Dagny Beynac and me—you wouldn't know how she's leaned on me about it, throughout this long while, on behalf of those folks." '

Lars rubbed his chin and took a smoky sip of whisky. "M-m, I have wondered at some of the assistance Fireball has given, loans of money and facilities and so forth. How could it pay? But I am no economist."

"You aren't alone in wondering, either," Guthrie THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 321

said. "Others have been more vocal about it, or downright obstreperous. Not being the absolute dictator of the company that the news media make me out as, I had several knock-down-and-drag-out fights behind the scenes, getting this or that operation okayed and holding it on track."

"Why?" inquired Ulla.

"Trust a woman to ask an embarrassingly straight question. Why'd I go along with Dagny's requests?

Well, as you might guess, partly I looked beyond the money side of it. The nations of Earth, the whole fat Federation, they need somebody in a position to cock a snook at them. At least, we the people do, if we aren't to see government growing all over us again like jungle rot." Guthrie's phrase went past his listeners. He hesitated. "But, well, also ... it was Dagny who asked."

"And now she has asked for top much?" Fire-crackle mingled with Lars's muted words.

"N-no. But it is pretty radical this time, enough to make me wonder real hard. So I thought I'd check with you."

"I am not—an intimate of hers. Not truly. Has she had any since Edmond died?"

"You know her better than most. And you, Sefiora Rydberg, seem to have a better than average feel for people. Let's try."

Lars leaned forward. "What does she want?"

"A torchcraft, designed and built to order, suitable for a Lunarian crew. That's nothing off the shelf, you realize. Financing it, complete with R and D, would be a tad burdensome for us, and repayment slow, if ever."

"Can't they wait until they are able to produce it themselves?"

"Evidently not. That could be a decade or more. They're too antsy. Anyhow, that's what Dagny claims. They want to get out and explore on their own. Really explore."

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"That is ... not unreasonable, is it?" Lars said. Ulla heard the longing and took his hand.

"I s'pose not. Still, to go this blue-sky at this earlyish stage of their space program—It looks like betting the store. For what?"

"She gave you no hint?"

"None, except that because her children boda-ciously want this, she does. Oh, there was talk of it as a symbol that'll help quiet down the rebellious mood in the younger Moon generation. A sop, I'd call it. And there was talk of it as an investment, training, experience, et cetera. But mainly, she admits, they're impatient."

"They grow no younger," Lars muttered. Ulla tightened her grip on his hand.

"I thought you might have the information or ideas to help me decide."

"I am sorry, no. That Lunarian generation is as foreign to me as to you."

Ulla raised her head. "I suspect this is no simple impulse," she offered. "They have something specific in mind."

"My selfsame hunch," Guthrie agreed.

Lars repeated himself: "I cannot believe my mother would endorse it, so wholeheartedly, if it were any threat to us."

"No, no, certainly not," Guthrie said. "But a substantial expense, recoverable maybe, and for me a royal ruckus with my directors."

"A treasure trove? Perhaps they have learned of an extraordinary lode on some distant body?"

"That's the obvious guess. I asked Dagny forthright. She said no, and asked me in return how the hell they could get wind of any such thing if they didn't have a ship to prospect in or even robot probes with the needful capabilities."

"A spacecraft in orbit is potentially a terrible weapon. One like that—"

"No!" Ulla cried.

"No is right," Guthrie said. "The Lunarians may in THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE323

assorted ways be crazy, but they aren't insane. Nor stupid."

Lars nodded. "I didn't mean that seriously," he explained. "I simply wanted to dismiss it. Also because of what my mother is. They could not hoodwink her, and she would never allow—" He drew breath. "Aside from the economics, what harm, jefe? Knowledge or wealth or whatever they hope to gain, does it not in the end come to all humankind?"

"That's a natural-born explorer talking, and, I'm afraid, an idealist. I'm less naive. Nor is Fireball in the business of do-gooding."

"It does do good," Ulla insisted.

"Sort of, in the course of doing well," Guthrie said. "Though Lord knows we've got our share of shortsighted greed, hog-wild foolishness, and the rest of the human condition. They weren't left out of my program, either.. . . But this wanders. Should we or should we not underwrite the venture?"

"I am inclined to think we should—" Lars began.

"In hopes of satisfying our curiosity about it, hey?" And again Guthrie laughed.

"That may never happen. I am thinking of discovery, and diversity, and—But we must talk together more. Can you really only stay until tomorrow?"

"Unfortunately, yes. Well, in what hours we've got, we'll puzzle along as best we can. I'm inclined to think we'll end up with 'Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!'"

Ulla looked a while at the robot and then said to the mind within it: "Because you too are what you are."

25

Venator had returned to Central after his interview with Matthias, less than satisfied. He had no simple need to do so. He could be as closely in touch with 324f

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developments, including any thoughts from the cy-bercosm, anyplace on Earth where there was an interlink terminal. But he felt that here he would find the calm and sureness from which his mind could win total clarity.

He well understood the reason for that feeling. This was "holy ground.

He was among the few humans who knew of it, other than vaguely. He was among the very few who had ever walked it.

The morning after his arrival, he set forth on an hours-long hike. Though athletic, he was not acclimated to the altitude. However, the evening before he had gotten an infusion of hemoglobin surrogate and now breathed easily. The air entered him cold, quiet, utterly pure.

Domes, masts, parabolic dishes soon dropped from view behind him. They were no more than a cluster, a meteorological station. Nothing showed of what the machines had wrought underground.

Instruments aboard a monitor satellite could detect radiations from below, but those were subtle, electromagnetic, infrared, neutrino; and the cybercosm edited all such data before entering them in the public base.

Seldom visiting, Venator was not intimate with the territory. From tim&to time he took out a hand-held reader to screen a map and a text listing landmarks; he used his informant to check his exact position and bearing. That was his entire contact with the outer world. He wandered untroubled, drawing serenity from magnificence.

His course was northward. Around him as he climbed, scattered dwarf juniper, birch, rhododendron gave way to silvery tussocks between which wildflowers bloomed tiny and rivulets trilled glistening. Sunlight spilled out of blue unboundedness; shadows reached sharp from lichenous boulders. Sometimes for a while he spied an eagle-vulture on high, sometimes a marmot whistled, once a cock

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pheasant took off like an exploding jewel. Ahead of him rose the Great Himalaya, from left horizon to right horizon, glaciers agleam over distance-dusky rock, the heights radiant white. A wind sent snow astream off one of those tremendous peaks, as if whetting it.

Venator's muscles strained and rejoiced. His breath went deep, his sight afar. From the might of the mountains he drew strength; trouble burned out of him; he was alone with infinity and eternity.

But those were within him. The highland had only evoked them. Among the stars, it was a ripple in the skin of a single small planet lost in the marches of a single galaxy. Life was already old on Earth when India rammed into Asia and thrust the wreckage heavenward. Life would abide after wind and water had brought the last range low—would embrace the universe, and abide after the last stars guttered out— would in the end frethe universe, the whole of reality.

•For intelligence was the ultimate evolution of life.

He knew it, had known it from before the day he was enrolled in the Brain Garden, not merely as words but as a part of himself like heart or nerves and as the meaning of his existence. Yet often the hours and the cares of service, the countless pettinesses of being human, blurred it in him, and he went about his tasks for their own sakes, in a cosmos gone narrow. Then he must seek renewal. Even so—he thought with a trace of sardonicism—does the believer in God make retreat for meditation and prayer.

Now he could again reason integrally and objectively. When he stopped for a meager lunch, on the rim of a gorge that plunged down to a sworoVblade glacial river, he called up for fresh consideration the memories he had brought with him from Vancouver Island, halfway around the globe.

Rain blew off the sea, dashed against the house, blinded the antique windowpanes. A wood fire crack-326

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led on the hearth. Its flames were the sole brightness in the high, crepuscular room. Their light ghosted over the man in the carven armchair.

"Yes," Matthias rumbled, "lan Kenmuir was here last week. And spent the night. Why do you ask, when obviously you know?"

Seated opposite him, Venator gave a shrug and a smile. "Rhetorical question," he admitted. "A courtesy, if you will."

Eyes peered steadily from the craggy visage. "What's your interest in the matter, Pragmatic?"

Equally obviously, it was considerable. Venatos was present in person and had declared his rank in order to impress that on the Rydberg. Nevertheless he kept his tone soft. "My service would like to find out what his errand was."

"Nothing criminal."

"I didn't say it was."

"Ask him."

"I wish I could. He's disappeared."

Brows lifted. The big body stirred. "Do you suspect foul play?"

This might be a chance to make use of the loyalties that bound the Fireball Trothdom together.

"It's possible," Venator said. "Any clue that you can give us will be much appreciated."

Matthias brooded for a minute, while the rain whispered, before he snapped, "A man can drop out of sight for many different reasons. We're not required by-law to report our whereabouts every hour.

Not yet."

Did he dread a stifling ftiture? "Not ever, sir," Venator replied. He was sincere. Why should the cybercosm give itself thtf trouble? "Police protection is a service, not an obligation. It does, though, need the cooperation of the people."

"Police. Hm." Matthias rubbed his chin. He scorned cosmetic tech, Venator saw; the veins stood out upon his hand, under the brown spots. "If one individual may have come to grief, it concerns the THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 327

civil police, not the Peace Authority." Had he been fully informed, he would doubtless have added: Most especially not a synnoiont agent of it. "You're being less than candid, seflor."

Venator's preliminary data retrievals had led him to anticipate stubbornness. "Very well, I'll try to explain. To begin indirectly: Do you support the Habitat project?"

"You mean putting L-5 in Lunar orbit?" The voice quickened. "Of course!"

"I should think your members all ought to," Venator pursued.

Matthias scowled. "Some among us have Lunarian sympathies. That's their right."

"Do they include Kenmuir?" Venator intensified his timbre. "Doesn't he care about other Terrans who hope to go where he's gone, make their lives where he's made his?"

"Spare the oratory, por favor," Matthias said.

Venator assembled words. "It's no secret how hostile most Lunarians are to the Habitat. Nor is it a secret that Kenmuir not only pilots for the Venture, he has ... close personal ties to his employer." Venture, Venator, passed through him. What an ironic similarity. "We have reason to believe he came to Earth on her account."

"To sabotage the project?" scoffed Matthias. "Pragmatic, I'm an old man. Not much time's left me to spend on stupid games."

Venator suppressed irritation. "My apologies, sir. I'd no such intention. Nor do I accuse Kenmuir of anything unlawful. It's only—the potentialities, for good or ill—" He let the sentence trail off, as if he forbore to speak of spacecraft and meteoroids crashed with nuclear-bomb force on Earth, malignant biotech and nanotech, every nightmare that laired at the back of many a human skull.

"What ill?" the Rydberg snorted. "At worst, the Habitat gets cancelled. I agree that for a small minority of us, that would be a disaster, or at least a 328

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heartbreaking setback. But let's have no apocalyptic fantasies, eh? Kindly be specific."

That was no easy task when Venator could not hint at the truth. "We're trying to understand the situation," he said carefully. "It appears the Lunarian faction has something in train. But what?

Why don't they proceed openly, through normal politics or persuasion? Call this a bugaboo if you wish,4>ut the Peace Authority dares not stand idly by. Events could conceivably get out of hand, with disastrous consequences." So had they done throughout history, over and over, always; for human affairs are a chaotic system. Not until sophotectic intelligence transcended the human had there been any hope of peace that was not stagnation, progress that was not destruction; and how precarious was still the hold of the steersman's hand! It was encouraging to see the white head nod. "At the same time, we have no legal grounds for direct action. We cannot prove and in fact we do not claim that Captain Kenmuir, or any particular person, has evil intentions. They may be ...

misguided. Inadequately informed. As we ourselves are at present."

"You may be on a false trail altogether."

"Yes, we may. Without more information, we cannot just assume that. You know what duty is."

"What would you have me do?"

"Tell me what Kenmuir wanted of you."

The face congealed. "It's normal for consortes to pay respects at Guthrie House when they get the chance."

"I doubt that Kenmuir was making a pilgrimage or seeking help in a private difficulty. Else why has he disappeared?"

Matthias sat unyielding. "The Trothdom honors the confidences of its consortes."

Venator eased his manner a little. "May I guess? You keep a secret here. You have for centuries, the same as you've kept that historic spacecraft."

"We're far from being the only association that has THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 329

its mysteries, sanctuaries, and relics," Matthias said low.

"I'm aware of that. But did Kenmuir perhaps ask you what the secret is?"

Silence responded.

Venator sighed. "I don't suppose I may ask the same thing?"

Matthias grinned. "Oh, you may. You won't get an answer."

"If I came back with an official order and asked?" Venator challenged.

Implacability: "Still less would you get an answer. If necessary, I'd blow out my brains."

Venator shaped a soundless whistle. The fire spat sparks. "Is it that large a thing?"

"It is. To us." Matthias paused. "But not to you. Nothing important to you. So much I will say."

"If you did tell me, and if you're right about that, which you probably are, I'd take the secret with me to my cremation," Venator promised.

"Would you? Could you?"

Venator thought of screened rooms and sealed, encrypted communication lines. "Why do you mistrust us like this?" he asked softly.

"Because of what you are," Matthias told him. "Not you as an individual, or even as an officer.

The whole way things are going, everywhere in the Solar System. It makes small difference to me.

I'm old. But for my grandchildren and their children, I want out."

"How is the Federation government oppressing you? It means to give you the Habitat."

"The purpose of government is government," Matthias said. Venator recognized a quotation from Anson Guthrie. "Muy bien, this one meddles and extorts less than any other ever did, I suppose.

But that's because it isn't the real power, any more than the national and regional governments below it are. The cybercosm is."

"We rely on the cybercosm, true—"

"Exactly."

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"But that it plans to enslave us—there's an apocalyptic fantasy for you!" Venator exclaimed. "How could it? In the name of sanity, why should it?"

"I didn't say that. Nothing that simple." The heavy voice was silent for a moment. Outside, wind gusted and the rain against the house seethed. "Nor do I pretend to understand what's happening.

I'm afraid it's gone beyond all human understanding, though hardly anyone has noticed as yet. For my race, before it's too late, I want out. The Habitat may or may not be a first step, but it's a very long way to"the stars."

Alpha Centauri, Venator thought, a sign in heaven. Without Guthrie and his colonists yonder, the dream —the chimera—would long since have died its natural death.

"Meanwhile," Matthias finished, "I'll keep hold as best I can of what's humanly ours. That includes the Founder's Word. Do you follow me?" His bulk rose from the chair. "Enough. Adids, Pragmatic."

The odds were that it didn't matter, that the lodgemaster had spoken truthfully and his defiance was symbolic. Indeed, what real threat did Kenmuir and his presumptive companion pose? Venator had guessed she possessed an expertise to which the spaceman would add his special knowledge; between them they might be able to devise a strategy that would find the Proserpina file and break into it.

Unlikely to the point of preposterousness, at least now, after it had been double-guarded by DNA access codes. More and more, Venator wondered if the whole business was not a feint, intended to draw attention from whatever scheme Lilisaire was actually engineering.

Other operatives were at work on the case, both sophotectic and human. He was their chief, but he knew better than to interfere. If and when they wanted his guidance, they'd call. Until then he'd assimilate their reports and get on with what he could do best himself.

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Kenmuir and his partner were worth tracking down for the clues they could maybe provide to Lilisaire's intent. Besides—Venator smiled—it was an interesting problem.

Striding along, he reconsidered it. They could not forever move around hidden from the system.

Already spoor of them must be there, in Traffic Control databases, in casual encounters, perhaps even in an unusual occurrence or two. People observed blurrily, remembered poorly, forgot altogether, or lied. The cybercosm did not. For instance, any service sopho-tect that had chanced to meet Kenmuir would recognize his image when it came over the net and supply every detail of his actions.

But machines of that kind were numbered in the millions, not to speak of more specialized ones, both sentient and robotic. The system was worldwide, hopelessly huge. A search through its entirety would take days or worse, tying up capabilities needed elsewhere. And during those days, what might Lilisaire make happen?

Well, you could focus your efforts. Delineate local units of manageable size. Inquire of each if anything had taken place fitting such-and-such parameters, within its area. That should yield a number of responses not too large, which could then be winnowed further. It would still devour time, but—

Whatever he did, he must act. However slight the chance of revelation was, he could not passively hazard it.

Venator shook his head. Sometimes he still found it hard to see how Proserpina could possibly mean that much.

The short-range politics was clear enough. Let the fact out, and the Terrans who wanted the Habitat would suddenly find themselves in alliance with the Lunarians who abhorred it, or at any rate not irresolvably opposed to them; and how could the Teramind itself make the mass of humankind realize that this threatened catastrophe?

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Because why did it? Revival of the Faustian soul, how vague that sounded. How many dwellers in this mostly quiet, happy world knew what it meant, let alone what it portended?

And did it really spell evil? Reaching for the stars, Faustian man had well-nigh ruined his planet and obliterated his species. Yet the knowledge he wrested from an uncaring cosmos, the instrumentalities he forged, were they not that from which the age of sanity had flowered?

Venator shivered in an evening going bleak. Westward the thinnest sickle of a new Moon sank below the mountains. Eastward, night was on the way.

He had lived the horrors of the past, wars, tyrannies, fanaticisms, rampant crime, millstone poverty, wasted land, poisoned waters, deadly air, the breaking of the human spirit, alienation, throngs of the desperately lonely, the triumph first of the mediocre and then of the idiotic, in civilization after suicidal civilization. He had lived them though books, multiceivers, quiviras, imagination, guided by the great sophotectic minds. Not that they had told him what to think. They had led him to the facts and told him he must think. Against the past, he had seen the gentle present and the infinitely unfolding future. Therefore—yes, he was a hunter born, but nevertheless—therefore he became an officer of the Peace Authority.

But did an arrogant and unbounded ambition necessarily bring damnation? Fireball Enterprises had created a fellowship of shared loyalty and achievement whose remnant endured on Earth to this day.

At Alpha Centauri too, a remembrance and a lure.

Venator hastened his footsteps. Another beacon shone before him, the lighted station.

As if inspired by the sight, an idea came. He snapped his fingers, annoyed at himself. Why hadn't he thought of it earlier? Probably because the contingency against which it would guard was so remote. Still, it was an easy precaution to take, and if some-THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 333

how it justified itself, why, the reward would be past all measure.

Evidently it hadn't occurred to the cybercosm either. The higher machine intelligences could well have come up with it, if only by running through permutations of concepts at the near-light speed of their data processing. But they had loftier occupations than this. The lower-level sophotects were as capable as he was, but in different ways. The electrophotonic brain did not work like the chemical neuroglandular system. That was the reason there were synnoionts.

Venator entered the main building and descended. Underneath it he went along a corridor where strange abstract shapes glimmered in the walls and strange abstract notes sounded out of them.

Linked into the net, he could grasp and savor a little of what such art evoked. Isolated in his flesh, he could not. He was the sole human here, monastically lodged and nourished. That was by his choice. Mortal indulgences belonged among mortals.

A detached sophotect passed by. The body it was wearing rolled on wheels and sprouted implements.

"Greeting, Pragmatic," it called courteously. He answered and they parted.

Elsewhere he had worked side by side with beings like this, and afterward sat in actual conversation. Not often, though. It had been agreeable and fascinating to him, but both knew how superficial it was. Direct data exchange was the natural way of the machines. Venator longed to begin upon it.

When he reached his communion room, he was trembling with eagerness. But that was the animal, which knew that soon the brain would be in rapture. Endorphins. .. . Somatically trained, he willed calm, donned the interlink, lay down on the couch, and requested clearance.

Although his purpose was simple and straightforward, he sensed the cybercosm as a single vast organism with a hundred billion avatars. The point-nexus 334

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that was his awareness could flash through strand after strand of the web, the ever-changing connectivity, to join any existence within it.

A bank of instruments at the bottom of the sea tasted the chemistries of a black smoker and the life it fed. A robot repaired the drainage line of a village in Yunnan. A monitor kept watch over the growth, atom by atom, of fullerene cables in a nanotank. A service sophotect chose the proper pseudo-virus to destroy precancerous cells in an aging human. Traffic Control kept aircraft in their millions safely flying, as intricately as a body circulates blood. An intelligence developed the logical structure needed for the proof or disproof of a theorem—but from that work the flitting point must retreat, half dazzled, half bewildered.

It was in wholeness with the world.

After a split second more full than a mortal lifetime, it moved to its purpose. From the net it raised the attention of a specific program, and they communicated.

In words, which the communication was not:

SHOULD THERE BE ANY ENTRY WHATSOEVER OF THE PROSERPINA FILE, AUTHORIZED OR NOT, TRACE THE LOCATION

OF THE SOURCE AND INFORM AGENT VENATOR. ALERT THE NEAREST PEACE AUTHORITY BASE FOR IMMEDIATE

ACTION.

DO NOT SPECIFY THE REASON FOR THIS.

APPROVED, responded the system. ENTERED AS AN INSTRUCTION.

And then, like a mother's anxious voice:

You are troubled. You are in doubt.

—I do not doubt, Venator saw. I do not quite comprehend, but I will believe.

(How can the system, even the Teramind, know what the outcome would be? Humankind is mathematically chaotic. We can learn no more than that history has certain attractors. Attempts at control may send it from one to another, unpredictably. A new THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 335

element, introduced, may change the entirety in radical fashion, from the configuration to the very dimensionality. Is it possible to write the equations? If they be written, is it possible to solve them? A danger is foreseeable, but a disaster either happens or it does not. We exist as we are because those who existed before us ran fearsome risks. How can we be sure of what we are denying those who exist after us, if we dare not set ourselves at hazard?) We cannot be sure.

—But in that case—

You shall know.

And the cybercosm took Venator into Unity.

Twice before had it done so, for his enlightenment and supreme rewarding. Anew it opened itself entirely for him. He went beyond the world.

He could not actually share. The thoughts, the creations that thundered and sang were not such as his poor brain might really be conscious of, let alone enfold. The intellects, star-brilliant, sea-fluid, rose over his like mountains, up and up to the unimaginable peak that was the Teramintj.

Yet somehow he was in and of them, the least quivering in the tremendous wave function; somehow the wholeness reached to him.

Reality is a manifold.

He became as it were a photon, an atom of light, arrowing through a space-time curved and warped by matter that itself was mutable. He flew not along a single path but an infinity of them, every possibility that the Law encompassed. They interfered with each other, annulling until almost a single one remained, the geodesic—almost, almost. Past and future alike flickered with shadows of uncertainty. He came to a thing that diffracted light, and the way by which he passed was knowable only afterward. He met his end in a particle of which he, transfigured, was the energy to bring it anywhere. The course that it took was not destined, but was irrevocable and therefore a destiny.

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You have learned the theory of quantum mechanics as well as you were able. Now behold the quantum universe—as well as you are able.

The identity that guided him was a facet of the Unity; but it communed with him as no sophotectic mind ever might. For this was the download of a synnoiont who died before he was born, which the Unity had taken unto itself.

Yang: The continuum is changeless, determined at the beginning, onward through eternity. For the observations of two observers are equally valid, equally real, but their light cones are not the same. The future of either lies in the past of the other. Thus tomorrow must be as fixed as yesterday.

Yin: The paths are ultimately unknowable. The diversities are unboundedly many. To observe is to determine, as truly for past as for future. Mind gives meaning to the blind evolutions that brought it into being. Existence is meaning. Within the Law, the configurations of the continuum are infinite. All histories can happen.

Yang and Yin: Reality does not branch. It is One.

He could no more look into the universe of the Teramind than he could have looked into the heart of the sun. He could know that it was there, in glory, forever.

Afterward he lay a long while returning to himself. Once he wept for loss, once he shouted for joy.

At last he rose and went about his merely human business.

He .had the promise. This body, this brain must someday perish. The self, the spirit that they generated would not. It too would go into that which was to find and be the Ultimate.

But omnipotence and omniscience were not yet, nor could they be for untold billions of years. He knew now why their reality required that Proserpina be forgotten.

26

The Mother of the Moon

Here the sun was only first among the stars, a hundred-thousandth as bright as over Luna, less than a tenth of full Earth. Still, when lights had been turned off in the observation cabin, eyes adapting to dusk saw shadows cast, faint and shifty. On the little world that crowded the primary viewscreen, peaks and crags reared gauntly forth, while glints and shimmers showed where metal lay naked. Dark vision was needful to make the rock surfaces something other than a mottled murkiness.

It found a scene like a delirium, mountains, plains, valleys, cliffs, rilles, pits, crevices, flows frozen in their final convulsions, things less identifiable, wildly scrambled together.

After months under thrust, acceleration and deceleration at a steady Lunar gravity, weightlessness came strange even to this crew. Brandir and Kaino floated, gazing, in silence. Air currents seemed to rustle no louder than their blood. Low and slow, torchcraft Beynac orbited her goal. It turned faster than she revolved, a rotation each nine and a half hours. Feature after feature crept over the leading horizon.

"Behold!" cried Kaino.

He pointed to a sootiness not far below the north pole, as it hove in sight. From a distance they had seen that it spread halfway around the globe. This close, they picked out the foothills and steeps of it. Where the range was tumbled or riven, they saw depths that gleamed bluish white.

"What is that?"

"A comet smote," Brandir judged. "This is the debris. Radiation caused exposed organic material from the comet to form larger molecules." He was quiet a few seconds, as if quelling a shiver. How long had that taken, in these outskirts of the Solar System?

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The lines in his countenance deepened. He forced matter-of-factness into the melodious Lunarian language: "Belike most is water ice."

Kaino nodded eagerly. His question had been unthinking; he knew as well as his brother what the sight probably meant. "A hoard of it! And if that prove not enough, why, I've observed another comet within a few hundred astronomical units." He gestured at auxiliary screens full of stars, Milky Way, nebulae, night. "A fortunate happenstance, amidst all this hollowness."

"Should we want it. We have tracked down our father's dream; we know not what new dreams may spring forth." Brandir spoke curtly. His mood was harsher than fitted this terminus of their expedition. He returned his attention to what he had been studying before Kaino exclaimed.

He forsook it again, and glared, when Ilitu entered. The geologist's brown hair was rumpled, his clothes carelessly thrown on. He checked his flight at the main screen and the contentment on his thin face flared into joy.

"So your heed is back upon science," Kaino greeted. Ilitu and Etana had gone off together, exultant, while Beynac was completing the approach.

The younger man ignored the jape, or pretended to. "Have you obtained a good value for the mass?"

he asked breathlessly.

Kaino nodded. "Twenty-nine and three-fifths percent of Luna's."

"A-ahh. Then indeed the body is chiefly iron. The core of a larger one, shattered in some gigantic collision, just as my mentor believed." Ilitu stared and stared. "But he could not foresee everything," he went on, almost as if to himself. "It is a chaos, like Miranda. It must itself have been broken in pieces, many of them melted, by that fury . . . and then shards of both rained down upon each other, fusing— Yes." A fingertip trembled across the images of a scarp two hundred kilometers long, a gash that gaped for

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three hundred, a highland that was a jumble of diverse huge blocks, chunks, and rubble. "The welding could not be total. The interior is surely veined with caverns and tunnels between ill-fitting segments. Sustained heavy bombardment would have collapsed them, making the spheroid still rougher than we see. Hence we know that Jupiter cast it afar soon after it formed. We have found a remnant of the primordial."

"There have been strikes since then," Brandir snapped. "Any witling could tell." He chopped a hand at the sight that had particularly interested him. Though craters were few, a big one with a central peak loomed in the southern hemisphere, receding from view as ship and planetoid wheeled.

"True," Ilitu agreed, conciliatory. "No matter how sparse, bodies must meet on occasion, in the course of four billion years or more. Yon great meteoroid, and the comet, and others; but seldom, and of scant geological consequence."

"Not to a man who can think. Piss about as you wish, grounds!de. I know what I will seek."

Ilitu's slender frame tensed. "Best we plan our field work before we start it," he said.

"When I desire your opinion, I will inform you," Brandir retorted.

Kaino plucked his sleeve. "Come," the pilot murmured. "I've need of you aft."

Brandir bridled. "I'm scanning the terrain."

"The cameras will do that better. Likewise Ilitu. Come." Kaino put a slight metallic ring into his voice. Sullenly, Brandir accompanied him from the cabin. In space, the pilot was master.

They did not push off and fly, but used handholds to pull themselves along the passage beyond, side by side. "What do you intend?" Brandir demanded.

"To calm you, brother mine. I smelted a fight brewing, and we cannot afford it. Relations have grown too strained already."

Brandir cast a sharp glance at the redhead. "You speak thus?"

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Kaino finger-shrugged and grinned lopsidedly. "After a person has crossed the half-century mark, the fires damp down a little. I should have thought yours were cooler from the outset—and you my senior, and Etana companionate with me, not you."

Brandir flushed below his thinning ashen hair. "Do you suppose me jealous? Nay, it's his insolence."

"It's that, sitting in your castle, you've become too wont to have what you want when you want it.

Yes, my own self-importance was stung. But we've both had plenty of women, inside our group or outside it. If Etana's come to favor a new man above me—I suspect his mildness appeals to her—why, there will be no lack of others to welcome ine home. Meanwhile, Etana does not disdain either of -

us two, does she? Ease off, you. We should both carry too much pride to leave room for vanity."

Brandir parted his lips, clamped them shut again, and shook his head angrily.

The copilot emerged from a cpmpanionway, spied them, and drew near. She was in her thirties, dark, fuller-bodied than usual among Lunarians. Like Ilitu, she had dressed hastily, and the black locks floated unkempt about a face that remembered Oceanian ancestors. A faint muskiness clung to her skin.

The three'poised in confrontation. She recognized the ill humor in Brandir and offered him a smile. "I was bound forward to see what we've found," she said.

"You felt no urgency earlier," he answered.

Resentment kindled. "Off duty, I choose my trajectory for myself."

Kaino meowed. They gave him a surprised look.

"R-r-rowr," he voiced. "S-s-s-s. Pity that you've neither of you the fur to bristle or the tails to bottle."

After a moment, Etana laughed. Brandir's mouth twitched upward. "Touch& " he muttered.

"I meant no offense, my lord," the woman told him softly. Never hitherto had she used that honorific. Her only allegiances were to the companionate she shared THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 341

with Kaino and to this ship; she could and would leave either when she saw fit. "I did not suppose you especially cared."

"I ought not," Brandir replied with some difficulty. "You are a free agent."

Comprehension flickered into Kaino's eyes, and perhaps as much compassion as he was capable of. He drifted aside and kept quiet.

Etana touched Brandir's hand. "We shall be here for a span, and then it's a long voyage home," she said. "There will be time for talk and for other things."

"You are ... kinder than I knew." He put on the reserve of the aristocrat. "I'll seek to arrange matters as may best please you, my lady."

Groundside, he, the major partner in Selene Space Enterprises and the most experienced leader aboard, would be in command.

He stood on that height he called Meteor Mountain and rejoiced.

As small as this world was, from here he could barely see parts of the crater ringwall, thrusting above the horizon. Under his feet the terk, lumpy mass went down to a plain of almost glassy smoothness, its gray-brown webbed with cracks and strewn with boulders. Over his head and around him gleamed the crowded constellations. Though night had fallen, they gave sufficient light for a person accustomed to Lunar Farside after sunset. Beynac was in the sky, free of the shadow cone, a spark gliding through Auriga toward the galactic belt.

Below him on the slope, he spied one of his robots at work, cutting loose a sample for analysis.

The task was essentially finished, however. Soon he could seek his van and take the crew back to camp. He transmitted, for the ship to receive and relay:

"It's established now beyond doubt. The impactor was ferrous, probably itself a remnant of the original body, which went out on an orbit close to this and 342

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eventually collided. Between its composition and the material forced up from the interior, the central peak is a lode of industrial metals, both light and heavy, even more easily recoverable than they are at other locations."

"That makes two treasures, then!" rang Kaino's response. He meant the cometary glacier which he and Ilitu had been exploring. Not only had they found immense quantities of water ice and organic compounds, they had identified ample cyanide and ammonia intermingled, frozen or chemically bound.

Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen: the fundamentals of life. "Never before, anything like! I could well-nigh believe in a god who meant it for us."

"That is not a necessary hypothesis," Ilitu said in his gentle, precise fashion, "Nor has coincidence been involved. Given Edmond Beynac's idea—a planetoid massive enough to form a core, smashed, then most of the pieces perturbed into Kuiper-Belt paths—the rest seems probable, perhaps inevitable. There were bound to be further encounters during gigayears, with rich fragments and with comets. This, the largest body, would attract more than its share. Weak irradiation and ultra-low ambient temperatures preserve volatiles as they cannot be preserved in the inner System."

"Thus speaks the savant," chuckled Etana affectionately from the ship.

"When will you be done where you are?" Brandir asked the men. Discoveries and what they would require were wholly unpredictable; and he had been too engaged with his to follow theirs in any detail.

"We prepare to depart," Kaino answered. "Let our successors trace out everything that's here.

After a short rest and resupplyihg, Ilitu wants to investigate the Great Scarp and the Olla Podrida. That's good in my mind, if we can go by way of Iron Heath." Those were features noted before anyone had landed, but not yet betrodden.

"Well, we'll talk of it in camp," Brandir said. "We THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 343

near our limits of accomplishment in the while that we have left to us."

"I'll trust Ilitu to persuade you," Kaino laughed. Brandir heard the click of signoff.

Etana's voice stormed at him: "How's this? They wander straightway to a new land, and* I remain caged?"

Doctrine. A qualified pilot must always be on standby. Tiny though the chance was of a meteoroid strike in these parts, and the solar flare hazard nonexistent, Brandir chose to abide by the rule.

"It would be a long walk home," he had said. Besides, when they were just three persons and a few robots on the ground, it was well to have a watcher aloft, ready to mount a rescue.

"Let Kaino take his turn here," she said. "He promised me. You all did."

"Khr-r, he has done rockjack work in the asteroids, you know," Brandir pointed out.

"And I have not? Admitted. But this is no asteroid. Not in truth. It's more akin to Luna. And I have ranged the outback at home as much as ever be or you."

"Y-yes—"

She laid rape aside. "It's merely fair," she argued. "You have spirit, Brandir. Would you care to sit idled week upon week, in the ghost-companionship of recorded screenings, while your mates roved free?"

"Later, yes, certainly you shall."

"Now! The hour is ripe, two surveys completed, the next to be readied for." Etana's tone sweetened. "It could be you I fare with, could it not? Ilitu has scant need of more than the robots to help him do his science. You and I are aimed toward whatever may prove useful to the future."

"I must think on that."

"Must you? Is it not star-clear? And . .. Brandir, I've grievously mi si iked our being at odds.

You kept yourself so masked. We should find our way to something better."

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In the end he yielded. Knowing this, he spoke more stiffly than might have been necessary when he called the other pair.

The sun .burst into sight. Farther stars vanished around it. Westward they still gemmed a majestic darkness, for the solar radiance was wan where no heiphts reflected it. This country was not altogether a plain of dull-colored rock, though. In places it sheened amidst the shadows that puddled in its roughness. Here and there the shadows reached long from formations whose laciness came aglitter and aglisten.

The anomalous region bordered rather sharply on the sort of terrain common on the lowlano's of this world-1—coarse regolith, like shingje, virtually dust-free. A field van rolled to the marge and stopped. Two spacesuited forms climbed out. A robot followed, four-legged, four-armed, thickly instrumented, burdened with .gear. For a minute they stood looking across the strangeness ahead of them.

Then: "Come!" rapped Kaino, and started forth afoot.

"Is this wise?" wondered Ilitu. "Send the robot first."

"We've no hours to squander on probing and sounding. Would you see what we're here to see? Get aflight!"

After an instant's hesitation, the geologist obeyed. The machine lumbered behind. While Kaino was furious at Brandir's decision, his haste also had an element of reason. He had insisted on del curing, and Ilitu backed him, in order that he might be sure of visiting Iron Heath before he arrived at camp and took a fiitsled up to Beynac. Otherwise he, at least, probably never would, given everything else there was to do in the limited time remaining for it and the unlikeliness of another expedition here soon. The roundabout route overland stretched both food and fuel cells thin; the men were on half rations, which doubled his impatience. They could not dawdle.

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After they had long been cramped in their vehicle, freedom to move brought exuberance as abrupt as the sunrise. "Hai-ah!" Kaino shouted. Forward he went in panther leaps. His spacesuit, state of the art, flexed around him, almost a second skin. Powerpack and life support scarcely weighted him. The dense globe pulled with a force 86 percent that of home, ample for Lunarian health and childbirth, liberating in its lightness. Landscape rivered from the near horizon to flow away beneath his feet. Breath sang in his nostrils, alive with a pungency of sweat.

He halted at the nearest formation. Ilitu joined him. They gazed. The robot trailed forlornly in their direction. It was built and programmed for a certain class of scientific tasks; at everything else, if it was capable at all, it was weak, slow, and stupid.

"What is this?" Kaino whispered.

From space, the travelers had simply become aware of curious protrusions on an unfamilar sort of territory. They could not untangle the shapes. Seen close up, the thing was sheerly weird.

An Earthdweller would have thought of coral. Lunarians knew that marvel only in books and screens.

An intricate filigree rose from the ground, thin, its topmost spires some 1 SO centimeters high, its width variable with a maximum of about 100. Variable too was the brightness of strands, nodules, and rosettes; but many gleamed in the hard eastern light.

Ilitu walked around it, leaned close, touched, peered, hunkered, rose, took a magnifying glass from his tool pouch and went over the irregularities bit by bit. When the robot reached him, he ignored it. The sun climbed higher, breakneck fast to a Lunarian. More stars disappeared.

Kaino began to shift about and hum a tune to himself.

"A ferrous alloy, J think," Ilitu said at length. "You observe whole metallic sheets strewn across the regolith. I deem they're overlays, not the inner iron bared, although we must verify that. I would guess that this

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and its fellows are spatter formations. An upheaval flung molten drops and gobbets about. When they came down in a group, they welded together as they solidified, which they would have done very quickly."

Kaino went alert. "A meteoroid strike? We've no sign of a crater."

"It may have happened when the planetoid was forming out of fragments, itself hot and plastic. ...

Hai, that suggests the original, catastrophic collision occurred near Jupiter, because I should think a strong magnetic field was present to urge so many gouts along converging arcs. And that suggests enormously about the origin of this body and its orbit... about the early history of the asteroid belt, the entire Solar System—" Ilitu beat fist in palm, over and over. He stared outward at the fading stars.

"If Father could have known!" broke from Kaino.

"Yes. I remember. He would have jubilated." Ilitu's softness went thoughtful again. "This is but a preliminary, crude hypothesis of mine. It could be wrong. Already I wonder if this unique planetoid may not have had, in the past, a kind of vulcanism special to itself. It does possess a significant magnetic field of its own, you recall, and the formation here has several resemblances to the Pele's Hair phenomenon on Earth."

"Eyach, we can take a few hours," Kaino said. "Gather more data."

Ilitu raised his upper lip off the front teeth. His parents would have grinned differently. "I will."

He took out a reader, keyed a map onto the screen, and studied it. His eyes darted about, correlating what he saw with the cartography done in orbit. Iron growths were scattered across the plain. About two kilometers hence, close to the southern horizon, a metallic band glistered from edge to edge of vision, some three meters wide. On the far side of it reared a whole row of coraldids, up to five meters tall.

"We'll go yonder," he said, pointing.

Kaino laughed. "I awaited no less. Ho-hah!"

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They set forth, as swiftly as before. In a few minutes Kaino veered. "Where go you?" asked Ilitu without changing course.

"That bush there." It was small but full of sparkles.

"I'll study the major objects first. If time remains and you've found this one interesting, I'll come back to it." Ilitu continued.

Kaino squatted down by the pseudo-shrub. Particles embedded in the darker iron caught sunlight and shone like glass. Maybe that was what they were, he decided after examination: fused silica entrained in the drops that had made the thing. Or they could be another mineral, such as a pyrite. He was no expert. Clearly, though, the geologist's intuition had been right. Here was nothing notable, merely beautiful. Kaino straightened and started off to rejoin his comrade.

Ilitu had just reached the metallic strip in front of his destination. A leap brought him onto it.

It split asunder. He fell from sight.

"Yaaaa!" screamed Kaino. He went into full low-gravity speed. Barely did he check himself at the border of the ribbon.

Ribbon indeed, he saw. This part of it, if not all, was no deposit sprayed across the rocks. It was, or had been, a cover for a pit—a cavern, a crevasse, or whatever—one of the emptinesses that seismic sounding had shown riddled the planetoid, as Ilitu predicted.

It must have been a freak, a sheet of moltenness thrown sidewise rather than downward in those moments of rage when Iron Heath took form. Low weight let it solidify before it dropped into the hole—unless the hole had appeared simultaneously, the ground rent by forces running wild—The layer was thin, and the cosmic rays of four billion years, spalling, transmuting, must have weakened it further—

Kaino went on his belly, crept forward, stuck his helmet over the gap. He failed to notice how the shingle slithered underneath him. Blackness welled

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below. "Ilitu," he called. "Ilitu, do you receive me? Can you hear me?"

Silence hummed in his earplugs.

He got a flashlight from his kit and shone it downward. Light returned dim, diffused off a huddled whiteness. Kaino played the beam to and fro. Yes, a spacesuit. Still no response. It was hard to gauge the distance when murk swallowed visual cues. He passed his ray slowly upward. The little pool of undiffused illumination wavered among shadows. An inexperienced man would have been nightmarishly bewildered.

Kaino, intimate with the Moon and certain asteroids, interpreted what he saw. He couldn't tell how long the fissure was, nor did he care, but it was about 175 centimeters broad here at the top and narrowed bottomwards. Ilitu lay forty or fifty meters below him. A nasty fall, possibly lethal, even in this gravity; but friction with the rough walls might have slowed it. There seemed to be depths beyond the motionless form. Ilitu might be caught on a ledge.

So.

Kaino got his feet and aimed his transmission aloft. The ship was not there at the moment, but her crew had distributed relays in the same orbit. "Code Zero," he intoned. Absolute emergency. "Kaino on Code Zero."

Etana's voice darted at him: "What's awry?"

Tersely, he explained. "Raise Brandir," he finished. "We'll want equipment for snatching him out—a cable and motor to lower a pallet, I'd guess—as well as the full medical panoply."

"Can't your Number One robot rescue him?"

Kaino glanced at the machine, which had arrived and stood awaiting his orders. "Nay," he said,

"it's useless." That body could not clamber down, and the program could not cope with the unknowns hiding in the dark.

"You may need to haul me up too," he said. "I'm going after him."

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 349

"No!" she yelled, "Kaino, you—" He heard the gulp. "At least fetch a line for yourself and have the robot hold it."

"That may well take too long. Ilitu may be dying."

"He may be dead. Belike he is. You don't hear him, do you? Kaino, stay!"

"He is my follower. I am a Beynac. Raise Brandir, I told you." The pilot switched off his widecaster.

He did take a minute to instruct the robot: Go back to the van, bring that wire rope, lower it to him if he was still down in the hole. Meanwhile he removed the bulky pack that held food, reserve water, and field equipment. Having activated his head and breast lamps, he went on all fours to the edge of the gap and set about entering it.

Stones kept skidding around. Twice he nearly lost his hold and tumbled. That made him laugh, low, to himself. On the third try he succeeded, bootsoles braced against one wall, life support unit against the opposite side. He began to work his way downward.

It was wicked going. He could not properly feel the surfaces through his outfit. The lights were a poor help, sliding off lumps, diving into cracks, mingling with shadows that dashed about like cat's paws of the gloom. Often he started to slip. Only low gravity and quick reflexes let him recover. As he descended and the crevice contracted, his posture made him ever more awkward.

Stressed muscles hurt. Sweat soaked his undergarb and stung his eyes. Breath rasped a throat gone dry. He toiled onward.

Wait. Had it grown a touch easier? More flex in the legs—He realized what he had been unable to see from above, that on the side where his feet were, the rift was widening again. If it broadened too much, he could fare no deeper. Unless—

Somehow he maneuvered about until by twisting his neck he could look the way he was bound. Ught picked out the sprawled form there and sheened off jagged pieces of the broken roof. Ilitu had indeed fallen onto a narrow shelf projecting from the wall at 350

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Kaino's back. Its ends vanished in the same darkness that gaped beside it. Pure luck. . . . No, not quite. That being the wall which slanted inward the whole way, and nearer to where the geologist fell through, it must have acted as a chute, its ruggedness catching at spacesuit and pack, slowing and guiding him.

Now that Kaino saw his objective half clearly, he could estimate dimensions and distances. The ledge was about ten meters below him, an easy drop in this weight, but it was less than a meter wide, and next to it yawned a vacantness a full two meters across. Low acceleration would give him a chance to push or kick at the iron, correct his course, but he'd have just three or four seconds, and if he missed his landing, that would doubtless be that.

"Convenient, being 98 percent chimpanzee," he muttered. After a moment's study he thrust and let go.

His drop was timeless, utter action. But when impact jarred through his bones and he knew himself safe, he glanced upward, saw the opening high above him full of stars, and laughed till his helmet echoed.

To work. Carefully, lest he go over the rim, he knelt Ilitu lay on his back. A sheetlike piece of metal slanted across the upper body. It had screened off transmission. Kaino plucked it away, tossed it aside, and heard wheezing breath. He leaned forward. Because he had come down at Ilitu's head, he saw the face inverted, a chiaroscuro behind the hyalon, lights and shadows aflicker as his lamps moved. The lids were slit-open, the eyeballs ghastly slivers of white. Saliva bubbled pink on the parted lips. "Are you awake?" he asked. The breathing replied.

His search found the telltales on the wrists. "Eyach," he whispered. Temperature inside the suit was acceptable, but oxygen was at 15 percent and dropping, carbon dioxide and water vapor much too thick. That meant the powerpack was operative but the air recycler knocked out and the reserve bottle emptied. "Hu," Kaino said, "I came in time by a frog's whisker, nay?"

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He couldn't make repairs. However, accidents to recyclers were known and feared. There was provision. He reached around his shoulder and released the bypass tube coiled and bracketed on his life support module.

More cautiously, hoping he inflicted no new injury, he eased Ilitu's torso up. His knee supported it while he deployed the corresponding tube, screwed the two free ends together, and opened the valves. Again he lowered his companion. They were joined by a meter of umbilicus, and his unit did duty for both.

He wrinkled his nose as foul air mingled with fresh. That took a while to clear. Thereafter, as long as neither exerted himself—and neither was about to!— the system was adequate.

He could do nothing more but. wait. Curiosity overwhelmed him. Although the surface was metal-slippery and sloped down, he put his head over its verge and shot his light that way. A whistle escaped him. Somewhat under the ledge, the opposite wall bulged back inward and the two sides converged. He could not see the bottom where they met, because fifty or sixty meters below him, where the gap was about one meter wide, it was choked with shards from above. Most, bouncing off the walls and this shelf, had gotten jammed there. Some were pointed, some were thin and surely sharp along their broken edges. Even here, to fall on them would be like falling into an array of knives. Space armor could fend them off. His flexible suit could not. Kaino withdrew to a sitting position.

Ilitu's breath rattled. The minutes grew very long.

A motion caught Kaino's eye. He flashed his beams at it and saw a line descending. The robot had been obedient to his orders. The line slithered across the ledge and onward before it stopped.

With limited judgment, the robot had paid out all.

Kaino saw no stars occluded. Nevertheless the machine must be at the rim of the chasm and thrusting an antenna over, for he received: "Your command 352

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executed. Pray, what is next?" On a whim, he had had the synthetic voice made throaty female. He wished now he hadn't.

"Drag the cable, m-ng, north," he directed. Inclined though its orbit was, the planetoid had a pole in the same celestial hemisphere as Ursa Minor. "I can't reach it.... Ah. I did. Stop." He secured bights around his waist and, with an effort, Ilitu's, precaution against contingency.

The program had a degree of initiative. "Shall I raise you?"

"No. Stand by." No telling what the damage to Ilitu was. A major concussion at least, a broken back or ribands into the lungs entirely possible. Rough handling might well kill him. That would be the end. The expedition had no facilities for cellular preservation, let alone revival. Better wait for a proper rig, trusting that meanwhile he wouldn't die or that cerebral hemorrhage wouldn't harm his brain beyond clone regeneration.

Again Kaino composed his mind. Time trudged. He remembered and looked forward, smiled and regretted, sang a song, said a poem, considered the wording of a message to somebody he cared about. Lunarians are not that different from Earth humans. Often he looked at the stars where they streamed above him.

And ultimately he heard: "Kaino!"

"I am here," he answered. "Ilitu lives yet."

"Etana loaded a flitsled with medical supplies, took it down to camp, and returned to the ship,"

Brandir said. "I've brought it here. She thinks she can land nearby if need be."

"Best get Ilitu to .our van, give him first aid, and then decide what to do." Kaino explained the situation. "Can you lower a pallet?"

"Yes, of course."

"I'll secure him well, then you winch him aloft, gently. Lest we bump together, I'll abide until you have him safe."

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"Once you were less patient, little brother," Brandir laughed.

"I will not be if you keep maundering, dotard," Kaino retorted. A wild merriment frothed, in him too.

The pallet bumped its way down the slanting wall, out of blackness and onto the ledge. Kaino took advantage of weak gravity to hold Ilitu's back fairly straight as he moved him. He undid the bight, closed and disconnected the air tubes, fastened the straps. "Haul away," he called. The hurt man rose from his sight.

"I have him," Brandir transmitted after a few minutes.

"Then let the robot reel me in," Kaino whooped, "and we'll go—go—go!"

The cable tautened, drawing him toward the stars.

Afterward Brandir determined what happened. He had rejoined his machinery, which rested well back from the crevasse rim. The robot was very close to it. At the moment of catastrophe, four billion-odd years ago, rocks as well as metal were thrown on high. The horizontal gush of molten iron that made the deck over the crack had a mistlike fringe that promptly congealed into globules along the verge. The stones dropped back on these and hid them. The planetoid swung out into realms where meteoroids are fugitively few. None ever struck nearby to shake this precarious configuration.

Low gravity means low friction with the ground, and here the shingle rested virtually on bearings.

The weight at the end of the line tugged at the robot. The regolith underfoot glided. The robot lurched forward. It toppled over the edge and fell in a rain of stones.

Below it, Kaino tumbled back to the shelf, skidded off, and plunged into the lower depth. The knives received him.

In the big viewscreen, surf crashed on a winter shore. The waves ran gray as the sky, burst into white, sent

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water hissing up the sand almost to the driftwood that lay bleached and skeletal under the cliffs.

Wrack flew like smoke low above; spindrift mingled with rain-spatters; the skirl and rumble shook air which bore a tang of salt and a breath of chill. It was as if Dagny Beynac's living room stood alone within that weather.

She thought that maybe she shouldn't have played this scene. It fitted her mood, she'd had it going since dawnwatch, but it was altogether alien to the young woman before her. Might Etana read it as a sign of hostility, of blame?

"Won't you be seated?" she asked. Unusual on the Moon so early in a visit, that was an amicable gesture. Besides, her old bones wouldn't mind.' She'd been pacing overmuch lately, when she wasn't off on a long walk, through the passageways and around the lake or topside across the crater floor. High time she started returning to everyday.

The guest inclined her head, more or less an equivalent of "Thanks," and flowed into a chair.

Dagny sat down facing her and continued, "Do you care for tea or coffee, or something stronger?"

"Grace, nay." Etana looked at the hands tightly folded in her lap. "I came because—I would be sure you understand—" Lunarians were seldom this hesitant.

"Go ahead, dear," Dagny invited softly.

The dark eyes lifted to meet her faded blue. "We thought of how we could leave him ... in his honor ... beneath a cairn on Iron Heath. Or else we could bring him home, that his kinfolk cremate him and strew his ashes over his mountains. But—"

Dagny waited, hoping her expression spoke gentleness.

"But a freeze-dried mummy!" Etana cried. "What use?" More evenly: "And although we must perforce lie about where and how he ended, to do it at his services were unworthy of him, nay?"

"You'd have attended?" wondered Dagny, taken unawares. Lunarians didn't bother to scoff at Earth THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 355

ceremonies, they simply avoided them. Christmas without grandchildren got pretty lonesome.

"Ey, your friends would have come and misliked it did his siblings and companionates hold away."

Etana paused. "But without a body to commit to its rest, our absence is of indifference, true?"

"Actually, I wouldn't have staged a funeral," Dagny said. "My man didn't want any. I don't for myself. It's enough if you remember."

"Nothing else? His companionates will—No matter."

Dagny didn't inquire about those rites, or whatever they were. The younger generations weren't exactly secretive; they just didn't share their customs with outsiders, in word or deed. Recalling the frustration of several anthropologists, she felt a smile skim her lips, the first since she got the news,

Etana went on: "In the end, Brandir and I did what we judged was due his honor and ours."

Dagny nodded. "I know." The brother had told her. When the velocity of the homebound ship was optimal for it, Kaino departed, lashed to a courier rocket, on a trajectory that would end in the sun.

Etana struggled further before she could get out: "I feared Brandir might not have made clear how—/ felt—and therefore I have come to you."

"Thank you," Dagny said, genuinely moved. They weren't heartless, the Lunarians, her children, their children. They weren't, not really. But wisest to steer clear of anything this personal.

"How is Ilitu?"

She had been too busy to inquire, after learning that he returned alive but in need of spinal cord regrowth and lesser biorepair. Too busy with grief, and handling condolences, and blessed, blessed work.

Etana brightened. "He fares well, should soon be hale. Thus he becomes a memorial unto Kaino."

That sounded rehearsed. However, the girl's happiness about the fact appeared sincere, so probably her gratitude was also. "You care for him, then?"

Etana went masklike.