He who sometimes called himself Venator was also known, to those who had a need to know, as an officer in the secret service of the World Federation Peace Authority. In truth—for the ultimate truths about a human are in the spirit—he was a huntsman.
In late mornwatch of a certain day on the Moon, he finished his business with one Aiant and left the Lunarian’s dwelling. After the twilight, birdsong, white blooms, and vaulted ceiling of the room where they had spoken, the passage outside glared at him. Yet it too was a place of subtle curves along which colors flowed and intertwined, ocher, mauve, rose, amber, smoke. At intervals stood planters where aloes, under this gravity, lifted their stalks out of spiky clusters as high as his head, to flower like fireworks six meters aloft. The breeze had a smell as of fresh-cut grass, with a tinge of something sharper, purely chemical. He could barely hear the music in it, fluting on a scale unknown to Earth, but his blood responded to a subsonic drumbeat.
Few others were afoot. This being a wealthy section, some went sumptuous of tunic and hose or sweeping gown, while the rest were retainers of this or that household, in livery not much less fine. One led a Siamese-marked cat on a leash—metamorphic, its genes transformed through generations to make it of tiger size. All moved with the same grace and aloofness as the animal. A pair who were talking in their melodious language did so very softly.
They were doubtless a little surprised by the huntsman. Terrans seldom came here, and he was obviously not one who lived on their world but from Earth. Under the former Selenarchy his kind had been debarred from entering the neighborhood at all except by special permission. However, nobody said or did anything, though the big eyes might narrow a bit.
He could have given them back those looks, and not always upward. Many Lunarians were no taller than a tall Terran, which he was. He refrained. A huntsman on the hunt draws no needless attention to himself. Let them glance, inwardly shrug, and forget him.
What they saw was a man lithe and slender, in his mid-thirties, with light-brown skin, deep-brown eyes, and black hair a woolcap on a head long and high. The features were sharp, nose broad and arched, lips thinner than usual for his ethnotype. Clad in a plain gray coverall and soft boots, he carried at his hip a case that might have held a hand-size computer, a satellite-range phone, or even a medic, but which in fact bore something much more potent. His gait was unhurried, efficient, well practiced in low-weight.
It soon took him from the district of old and palatial apartments, through another and humbler inhabited mainly by his species, on into the commercial core of the city. Three-story arcades on plume-like pillars lined Tsiolkovsky Prospect, duramoss yielded underfoot, illusions drifted through the ceiling far overhead. Here there were more folk. Most of the Lunarians wore ordinary garments, although their styles of it—upward-flared collars, short cloaks, dagged skirts, pectoral sunbursts, insignia of phyle or family, colors, iridescences, inset glitterlights, details more fanciful still—would have been florid were it not as natural on them as brilliance on a coral snake. Three men came by together; their walk and posture, black kilts and silver-filigree breastplates, comparatively brusque manner and loud speech, said they were from Mars. Asterites were scarce and less readily identifiable.
Terrans numbered perhaps three out of ten. Some declared themselves Lunar citizens by some version of Lunarian garb, often the livery of a seigneurial house. Others stayed with Earthside fashions, but one could see by their carriage and by tokens more slight that they were citizens too, or at least long-term residents. Among themselves both kinds used ancestral tongues, unless Lunarian was all that they had in common.
About a third of the Terrans were here from Earth on assorted errands. Tourists were conspicuous by their rarity as well as their awkwardness and stares. Why trouble to come for pleasure when you could have the experience more easily and cheaply in a quivira? Your brain would register and remember the same sensations.
These people were too sparse to be a crowd. Half the shops, restaurants, bistros, bagnios, amusement specialties, and cultural enterprises in the arcades stood closed and vacant. Background noise was a susurrus through which a gust of music would twang startlingly strong or a drift of perfume entice the nostrils. A conversation ahead of him resounded clearly as the huntsman drew near.
“—sick of being second-class, all my life second-class. So far can I go, so much can I achieve, then I strike the invisible wall and everything begins to happen in such ways that nothing further is possible for me.”
The language, Neudeutsch, was among those the net had implanted in the huntsman. He slowed his pace. Familiar though the complaint was, he might possibly get a little useful input.
Two sat at a street-level table outside an otherwise empty café tended by a robot. The speaker was plainly a Terran Moondweller, though he wore a Han Revival robe in a forlorn sort of defiance. He was as well-muscled as if he lived on Earth; perhaps he worked off rage with extra exercise. The skin stood taut on his knuckles where he gripped a tumbler. His companion, in a unisuit, was just as plainly a visiting European.
She sipped her own drink and murmured, “Not quite all your life.”
“No, of course not. But we’ve lived here for two hundred years, my family.” The man tossed off a gulp. His words tumbled forth. “My parents went back to Earth only to have us, my siblings and me.” Evidently it had been a multiple conception, three or four zygotes induced, to spare having to repeat the whole expensive timespan. Probably, the huntsman thought, gestation had been uterine, to save the cost of exogenesis. “As soon as we were developed enough, they returned with us. Nine months plus three years they were gone. Should that have lost them what miserable employment they had? Should the need make us aliens, inferiors? The law says no. But what does the law count for? What is this damned Republic but the same old Selenarchy, in a disguise so thin it’s an insult?”
“Calm, please be calm. Once the Habitat is ready, things will soon become very different.”
“Will they? Can they? The Selenarchs—”
“The magnates will be overwhelmed, obsolete, irrelevant, within a decade, I promise you. Meanwhile, the opportunities—”
The huntsman went past. He had heard nothing new after all. The woman was involved in one or another of the consortiums already searching out potentials for the Moon of the future. Perhaps she had some use for the man, perhaps he was merely a chance-met talkmate. It didn’t matter.
What did matter was that that future lay in danger of abortion.
Despite the service centers at Hydra Square, the fountain in the middle of the plaza splashed through its silvery twinings and fractals alone. The door of the constabulary retracted to let a uniformed officer in and a couple of civilians out, otherwise the fish below the clear paving swam about nobody’s feet but the huntsman’s. No paradox, though Tychopolis be the largest of the Lunar cities. Here, too, automatons, robots, and sophotects increasingly took over such tasks as medical care, maintenance, and rescue, while the population requiring those attentions declined. He expected the area would again be thronged once the settlers from Earth had established themselves (for however long that would last, a few centuries, a few millennia, a blink in time for the Teramind but long enough in human reckoning). Unless their hopes died beneath the claws of the Selenarchs.
No, he thought, have done with those ideas. He had found no evidence of any widespread conspiracy. It seemed he had an adversary more capable than that, brewing a menace less combatable.
He never knew fear. An organism born to be brave had learned self-mastery on St. Helena and gone on into the cybercosm. But when he considered what might come of this, a thousand years hence or a million, bleakness touched him.
Resolution resurged. He willed nonsanity away. Rationally estimated, the odds were high in favor of his cause. Let him proceed, and the future he had imagined would be one that he aborted.
Besides—a smile played briefly—he expected to enjoy his quest.
From the square he went on down Oberth Passage. Industry, computation, biotech, molecular, and quantum operations proceeded in busy silence behind its walls. Something was not perfectly shielded, and a stray electromagnetic pulse happened to resonate with the net inside his skull. Memories sprang up unbidden, dawn over a wind-rippled veldt, the face of a preceptor in the Brain Garden, dream-distorted. He leaped out of the influence and regained himself.
The disturbance had whetted his senses. He observed his surroundings with redoubled sharpness, although there was little to see. Nobody else walked this corridor. The only emblems of ownership were on the doors of facilities now abandoned. An academic part of him reflected how the seigneurs of the Moon disdained the minor trades and businesses viable in a post-capitalist economy and mostly lived off their inherited holdings. To be sure, some of those were far-flung in the Solar System and not insubstantial on Earth. Also, a few individuals continued active in enterprises they deemed worthy of themselves. The associated companies of their Venture were still breaking new ground on Mars, small moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the comets, the asteroids. …
The huntsman’s mouth drew tight. He went onward in long low-gravity bounds.
Ellipse Lane curved off from Oberth. Fifty meters down it, he came to his lodgings. The front was as bare and undistinguished as the corridor. He put his right palm against the keyplate.
It looked like any other, but it did not merely scan lines in the skin. All standard security devices could be fooled in any of several different ways, if someone had the will and the means. Were such an attempt made here, the lock would alert headquarters. Meanwhile it removed three or four cells from him, which he did not feel, and shunted them to a DNA reader. This identified him, and the door retracted. The identification took a little more time than usual, but so little that a watcher who didn’t know would not have noticed. A hundred milliseconds or five hundred, what difference? Speed like that demanded an enormous capability, but it was present, hidden. The huntsman entered his den.
After the door shut behind him, the place seemed barren. It wasn’t really a home. Two inner cubicles held a bed, a sanitor, a nutrition unit, and whatever else was barebones necessary, but here were only screens, panels, receptors, and other unobtrusive outwardnesses of the great, thinking engine. The ceiling shone cold white, and air circulated odorless.
When the site was converted to an apartment—he had heard that it was formerly a tavern—the secret service of the Peace Authority acquired it under the name of a data-synthetic person and remodeled it, an unnoticeable piece at a time. That seemed a reasonable precaution, inasmuch as the Republic of Luna restricted the Authority to a single office and a platoon in Port Bowen. A listening post and center for safe communications was desirable elsewhere, in a nation this widespread and tricky. Later the huntsman’s corps had installed their special gear, and at the moment he was using the fictitious name.
He went straight to work. More drove him than eagerness in the chase. For too many daycycles he had been just briefly and intermittently in synnoiosis. This episode of it would go longer and deeper, enough to sustain him until he returned to Earth and could again enter a full communion.
Or a Unity—no, he dared not yearn for that. Not now.
Opening the case at his flank, he took out the interlink, unfolded it, and adjusted it on his head. It fitted like a coif of closely woven black mesh with bright small nodules at a number of the intersections. Within was a complexity not much less than that in a living cell, and in certain respects more: crystals and giant molecules never found in nature, interactions down to the quantum level. It was best to be physically relaxed, however mild the demands of Lunar gravity. He reclined on a couch before a deceptively simple-looking control panel. “Is all clear?” he inquired.
“All clear,” replied the sophotect that had kept watch on the room and the communication lines. “Carry on at will.”
The huntsman plugged in his interlink. Wire and contact were structures comparably intricate. He willed. Synnoiosis began.
The net that nanomachines had woven inside his head, when he was a cadet in the Garden, came active. It traced out the ongoing, ever-shifting electrochemical activity of his brain, rendered the readings as a multiple-terabaud data stream, and passed them on to the interlink, which translated them into machine language and conveyed them farther. As the system responded, the interlink became a generator of pulses and dancing fields whereby the net directly stimulated the brain.
The process appeared to be as uncomplicated as the outward show of the things themselves. It was in fact an achievement beyond the creation or the full understanding of any merely human intelligence. It joined two orders of being that were utterly unlike—organic and inorganic, chemical and electrophotonic, life and post-life.
It was not telepathy, it was communication by language through an interpreter. But to master that language, the huntsman had paid with his childhood and youth. And it was not a language that went through the ears or the eyes, the sensor or the keyboard. It went directly between nervous system and circuitry.
For him, its fullness was a transcendence higher than ever he knew in sexual union, mortal danger, or intellectual challenge. He had asked sophotects how it was for them, but they had been unable to explain. If nothing else, among them oneness was as normal an occurrence as feeding was to him.
This was only a partial, almost superficial, interface. He dealt in straightforward information, material that could have been rendered in text, graphics, and speech. The sophotects involved, the one here and the one at headquarters in Port Bowen, were conscious. They thought, but they were narrowly specialized and focused, content to dwell immobile, essentially bodiless, with all input and output going along the data lines. The system itself was limited in both databases and capabilities. Even on the Moon, larger nets existed; but if he tapped into them, he might alert his prey.
Nevertheless, this synnoiotic session was more than a hurried report or query. Far faster and more comprehensively than could have been done in the flesh, he gave out what he had learned and received what he asked for. He need not trace a way through hypertext; associated facts and ideas came to him as an integrated whole. Entire histories became his. A hundred variant plans of campaign developed, simulated their probable consequences, and left behind them what parts he deemed worth fitting into a new synthesis. Above and beyond loomed the sense of how it all reached through space-time, past and future and the ends of the universe, and how fateful it might yet prove.
The cool and luminous ecstasy had no counterpart among mortals, although religious enlightenment or a basic mathematical insight shared aspects of it. He was in a single mind that built its own memories and discoursed with itself by many thinkings on many levels conjoined. That polylogue was not for any human tongue to repeat. Even its material content grew cumbersome when set baldly and linearly down.
Aiant, husband of Lilisaire, resident here in Tychopolis, is seldom in contact with her and almost never meets her. They are second cousins. She sueceeded her father in the ancestral estates by right of optigeniture, but Aiant contested this and there is reason to suspect he had the father assassinated. Although she was only 23 at the time, Lilisaire undertook intrigue and occasional surreptitious violence on her own behalf. In the course of five years she outmaneuvered him, leaving him stripped of most of his conciliar powers and close to bankruptcy. Then she married him. The alliance works well. He is secondary but not subjugated, and profits by serving her interests, especially her share of the spacefaring Venture.
He and his city wife (probably chosen for him by Lilisaire because of her family connections, she being of the Mare Crisium phratry) received me courteously if not cordially and were as cooperative as could be expected. They were eager to convince me that there is no plot to sabotage the Habitat, as I had led them to believe we suspect. A full-scale investigation by the Peace Authority would inconvenience the Venture at best, and might turn up matters that really are being kept secret. They retrieved all the data I requested (not knowing me for a synnoiont, who could get more out of this information than an entire detective squad).
Conclusion: They are ignorant of any untoward activity, and their organization is not involved in any, although individuals and cabals within it may be.
It was already established that Caraine of Hertzsprung, Lilisaire’s younger husband, their adult son Bornay, and Caraine’s other two wives are equally uninvolved. Although oftener together physically with Lilisaire than Aiant is, Caraine has little to do with her various undertakings. The alliance is useful to both, coupling Phyle Beynac and Phyle Nakamura in a genetically and strategically desirable bond between the Cordilleran and Korolevan phratries, and a personal affinity exists. However, besides his estate, Caraine is engaged in politics, being one of the few Lunarians, especially of Selenarchic descent, who has condescended to develop parliamentary skills.
As such, he is valuable to the aristocratic faction, machinating to keep them in effective power and the Terran minority effectively disfranchised. Lilisaire would likely regard it as wasteful to engage his energy and talents in anything else. Moreover, in recent months he has been fully and conspicuously occupied in the effort to mobilize opposition to the Habitat sufficient to force the cancellation of the project. Improbable though his success is, he would scarcely be wanted meanwhile in any clandestine endeavor. Nor have his wives and children left home or communicated with anyone off the Moon.
Thus Lilisaire may well be the only Lunarian magnate preparing trouble for us. This gives no grounds for complacency. She could prove as formidable, and is certainly as ruthless, as her famous ancestors Rinndalir and Niolente.
Evidence: Legal proof is lacking, and the case would in any event not be prosecuted by the present Lunar government; but the Peace Authority intelligence corps has ascertained that in younger days she killed at least two men in duels. One was fought topside in the wilderness with firearms, one in her castle with rapiers. She has traveled widely, even braving the gravity of Earth, where she has a large inherited property. She has gone out to Mars, the asteroids Jupiter, and Saturn. She is enamored of deep space and of endeavor in it. (A more distant ancestor of hers was a grandson of both the explorer Kaino and the poet Verdea.) But she is coldly realistic about her part in the Venture operations.
She maintains connections throughout the Solar System. Some of these are with former lovers, especially influential Earthmen, who, if not actually her allies, are usually willing to oblige her with information and assistance. Her reckless, voluptuous youth is behind her, but her power to fascinate and mislead has, if anything, grown with the years. This is not a negligible factor. It is one which the cybercosm is ill suited to comprehend or control.
She is highly intelligent, possesses an extensive cybernet, and has at her call a variety of agents. About many of these we have only intimations no knowledge of identity, location, or function.
Lately our watch program over her communications detected a message to a spacer in the asteroids, bidding him come to her immediately. (Not knowing precisely where he was, she could not beam in quantum encrypted. Nor would he likely have had equipment to decode it.) She may not be aware that we are monitoring. If she is, she doubtless means to pass this off as involving some service he can do her which is no affair of the government’s.
But the matter is almost certainly not trivial. This Ian Kenmuir is an Earthman in the service of the Venture. His one distinction is that he has been her guest in Zamok Vysoki, and probably her lover. (That was not publicized in any way. Although Lunarians seldom like being in the public eye, they also seldom make any effort to conceal such doings, being indifferent to gossip or contemptuous of it.) His very obscurity may well recommend him to her for her purposes.
Or he may have knowledge, or access to knowledge, that she wants. Those researches of hers are aimed at deep space. Very deep space.
I propose to visit her.
I have a pretext prepared. The odds are that she does not know that we know of her quiet inquiries. The order to monitor her came from high in the cybercosm—perhaps from the Teramind itself when it observed those questions being asked and foresaw where the answers would lead.
She must know that agents of the Peace Authority have called on associates of hers. It would appear strange if none talked also with her. I do not expect to discover much, if anything. Yet … I am a synnoiont.
GO, THEN, the system of which he was a part told him.
That oneness died away. The huntsman removed himself from the net.
For a while he lay quiescent. Nothing felt real. The facts and the decision were in him but he could not remember them other than as fading wisps of a dream. The physical world seemed flat and grotesque, his body a foreigner.
The sense of loss passed, and he was human again. Hunger and thirst nudged him to his feet. “Put me in touch with the lady Lilisaire,” he directed the sophotect, and went to get his nutrition.
It was minimal. He could savor good food and drink, if the amounts were moderate, but not when on the trail.
Afterward he relaxed at the vivifer. The show he summoned was a comedy set in the New Delhi of Nehru. He did not set the speech converter; Indi was among his languages. The story was shallow and not especially believable—although he admitted to himself he had scant rapport with low-tech societies, today or in the past—but sight, sound, scent, tactility were well done. To have a more lifelike experience, he would have had to get into a quivira.
A bell tone pulled him from it. So soon? He had been resigned to waiting hours before the system located Lilisaire and persuaded her to give audience to a constable.
He hastened to the eidophone. Her image met him, vivid as fire. He saw, above a long neck, a face nearly classic save for the high cheekbones, peculiar ears with blinking stardrops in the lobes, gold-flecked sea-green of the big oblique eyes, flared nostrils, wide mouth where smiles and snarls might follow each other like sun and hailwind. Startling against blueveined white skin was the hair, auburn threaded with flame-red, swept up from her brow and falling halfway down her back. He knew from recordings that she was as tall as he, slender, long-legged, firm in the breasts and rounded in the hips. He saw a lustrous cheongsam, a headband patterned on the DNA molecule, and hardly a trace of her fifty-odd years. Medical programs accounted for only a part of that, he knew. With Lunarian chromosomes, she might reach a fourth again of his projected 120.
If they both survived.
“Hail, my lady,” he greeted in his fluent Lunarian. “You are gracious thus to respond.”
For some reason, she chose to reply in Anglo. Her voice purred low. “Unwise would I be to linger when the Peace Authority calls.”
He shifted to the same tongue. “You know full well, my lady, we have very little power within your country unless your government grants it. Wise you may be, but kind you certainly are.”
She smiled. “A neat riposte. What would you of me, Officer?”
“An interview, if you please. I think you would prefer it be either over an encrypted line or in private person.”
Arched fox-colored brows lifted higher. “What could be so critical?”
“I believe you have made a shrewd guess at it, my lady.”
The mercurial visage refashioned cordiality. “May-chance I have. We shall see, Captain—Eyach, I have no name for you.” The sophotect, pretending to be a robot, had declared that was his rank.
“My apologies, my lady. I forgot to instruct the communicator about that.” It was true, and he felt annoyed at himself. His name had long ceased to have meaning for him and he used any that suited his purposes. His actual identity was a function within the cybercosm.
“Venator,” he said, accenting the penult. Roving through the databases, his favonte recreation, he had acquired a jackdaw hoard of knowledge. It amused him to resurrect this word from a language dead and well-nigh forgotten.
Lilisaire inquired no further. Probably more Earthlings than not went without surnames these days, as Lunarians always had. He imagined her thinking in scorn: but the Earthlings have their registry numbers. Her courtesy remained smooth. “Then, Captain Venator, wish you to come directly to me at Zamok Vysoki? I will make you welcome.”
Astonished, he said, “At once? I could take a suborbital and be there very shortly, but—”
“If you, of the Peace Authority, have a suborbital available at Tychopolis, your superiors look on this as important,” she said, still at catlike ease. “Yes, do, and allow time for the taking of hospitality. I will await.” The screen blanked.
He sat for a brief while recovering his equilibrium. How much did she know? What was her intent—to rush him along, to lead him astray, or merely to perplex him for sport’s sake?
If she was on the attack, let him respond.
Quickly he stripped, stepped under needle spray and dryer, and donned a close-fitting blue uniform with bronze insignia. Formality was his first line of defense. After hesitating, he decided to leave his interlink behind. He didn’t anticipate urgent need of it, and he was unsure what detectors and probes Lilisaire kept in her stronghold. The less she discovered about him, the better.
The sophotect made arrangements while he was on his way to the flyport. A fahrweg took him below the ringwall, out to the drome. Antique installations like this remained in service in regions of lesser prosperity and population, also on Earth. His fellow riders were few. The vehicle waited in a launcher already set and programmed for its destination. A mobile gangtube admitted him to it. He secured himself in a seat. Go, he pressed.
Against this gravity, the electromagnetic acceleration was gentle. In moments he was falling free along an arc that would carry him high above the Moon and a quarter of the way around it.
Silence brimmed the cabin. Weightlessness recalled to him, a little, that ocean of thought in which he had lately floated. He looked out the viewsereens. Beneath him shadows edged a magnificent desolation of craters and worn-down highlands. Monorails, transmission towers, solar collectors, energy casters glittered steely, strewn across that wasteland. Few stars shone in the black overhead; light drowned them out. To north the sun stood at late Lunar morning. Earth was not far from it, the thinnest of blue crescents along a darkling disc. They sank as he flew.
Idly, he turned off the cabin lights and enhanced the stars. Their multitudes sprang forth before him, more each second while his eyes adapted. He traced constellations, Eridanus, Dorado—yonder the Magellanic galaxies—Crux, Centaurus … Alpha Centauri, where Anson Guthrie presided over his companion downloads and the descendants of these humans who had left the Solar System with him. … No, the Lunarians among them didn’t live on the doomed planet Demeter but on asteroids whirling between the two suns. …
Had that exodus been the last and in some ways the mightiest achievement of the Faustian spirit? A withdrawal after defeat was not a capitulation. Someday, against all believability, could it somehow carry its banners back home? Wliat allies might it then raise? It was not yet dead here, either. He was on his way to meet with a living embodiment of it.
Revolt—No, nothing so simple. The Lyudov Rebellion had been, if anything, anti-Faustian. “Reclaim the world for humanity, before it is too late!” Keep machines mindless, create anew an organic order, restore God to his throne.
But Niolente of Zamok Vysoki had had much to do with stirring up that convulsion; and Lilisaire bore the same resentments, the same wild dreams.
A warning broke Venator from his reverie. Time had passed more quickly than he thought. Jets fired, decelerating.
The vehicle and the ground control system handled everything. He was free to observe. His glance ranged avidly ahead and downward. Images of this place were common enough, but few Terrans ever came to it. He never had, until now.
Eastward the mountains fell away toward a valley from which a road wound upward, with Earth and sun just above the horizon. Westward the castle rose sheer from its height, tiered walls darkly burnished, steep roofs, craggy towers, windows and cupolas flaring where they caught the light. It belonged to the landscape; the design fended off meteoroids and radiation, held onto air and warmth. Nevertheless, Venator thought, a Gothic soul had raised it. There should have been pennons flying, trumpets sounding, bowmen at the parapets, ghosts at night in the corridors.
Well, in one sense, ghosts did walk here.
The flyer set down on a tiny field at the rear of the building. A gangtube extended itself from otherwise bare masonry and osculated the airlock. The huntsman went in.
Two guards waited. In form-fitting black chased with silver, shortswords and sonic stunners at hips, they overtopped him by a head. The handsome faces were identical and impassive. They gave salute, right palm on left breast, and said, “Welcome, lord Captain. We shall bring you to the Wardress,” in unison and perfect Anglo.
“Thank you.” Venator’s own Anglo was of the eastern, not the western hemisphere. He fell in between them.
The way was long. An ascensor brought them to a hallway where the illusion of a vast metallic plain was being overwhelmed by blue mists in which flames flickered many-hued and half-glimpses of monsters flitted by, whistling or laughing. It gave on a conservatory riotous with huge low-gravity flowers, unearthly in shape and color. Their fragrances made the air almost too rich to breathe. Beyond was another corridor, which spiraled upward, twilit, full of funereal music. Ancestral portraits lined the walls; their eyes shifted, tracking the men. At the top, a vaulted room displayed relics that Venator would have liked to examine. What was the story behind that knife, that piece of meteoritic rock, that broken gyroscope, that human skull with a sapphire set in the forehead? The next chamber must have its everyday uses, for spidery Lunarian furniture stood on a white pelt of carpet; but the ceiling was a blackness containing an enormous representation of the galaxy, visibly rotating, millions of years within seconds, stars coming to birth, flaring, guttering out as he watched.
He came to Lilisaire.
The room she had chosen was of comparatively modest size and outfitting. One wall imaged a view of Lake Korolev, waves under a forced wind, dome simulating blue heaven, a pair of sport flyers aloft, wings outstretched from their arms. On a shelf, a nude girl twenty centimeters tall, exquisitely done in mercury-bright metal, danced to music recorded from Pan pipes. A table bore carafes, goblets, plates of delicacies. Lilisaire stood near it.
The guards saluted again, wheeled, and left. Venator advanced. “Hail anew,” he said with a bow, in Lunarian, using the deferential form. “You are indeed gracious.”
She smiled. “How so, Captain?” As before, her reply was in Anglo.
He went back to the Terrestrial language. Why make it clear how well he knew hers? But courtliness, yes. “The tension between—I won’t say between our races or even our societies, my lady, but between your class and mine. And still you set privacy aside, though I understand full well how your people prize it, and you receive me in your home.”
Her tone stayed amicable. “Also enemies negotiate.”
“I’m not exactly an envoy, my lady. And to me you are no enemy. Nor are Earth or the World Federation enemies to you.”
The voice stiffened. “Speak for yourself, not them.”
“Who wishes you harm?”
“Wishing or nay, they make ready to wreak it.”
“Do you refer to the Habitat, my lady?” he asked: a socially necessary redundancy.
She evaded directness. “Much else has Earth done to Luna.”
“Why, it was Earth that brought Luna alive.”
She laughed. The sound was brief and low, but in some sly fashion uttered with her whole body. “You have a quite charming way of affecting naïveté, Captain. Let me, then, denote us as dwellers on the Moon.”
He followed her conversational lead, for his real purpose was to explore her attitudes. “May I speak freely?”
“Is that not the reason you came?” she murmured.
Now she was playing at being an innocent, he thought. “When you say ‘dwellers,’ I suspect you mean Lunarians, not resident Terrans, not even those Terrans who are citizens. And … if you say ‘Lunarians’ to me, do you perhaps mean the Selenarchic families—or the Cordilleran phratry—or simply its overlings?” Try, cautiously, to provoke her.
The green gaze levelled upon him. The words were quiet but steady. “I mean the survival of the blood.”
That should not have put him on the defensive, but he heard himself protest, “In what way are you threatened, your life or your property or anything that’s yours?”
“My lineage is. You propose to make Lunarians extinct.”
The shock was slight but real. “My lady!”
Lilisaire finger-shrugged. “Eyach, of course the fond, foolish politicians who imagine they govern humankind, they think no such thing, insofar as they can think at all. They see before them only the ego-bloated eminence that will be theirs, for that they opened the Moon to Terrans.”
“The gain’s much more than theirs,” he must argue. “Those people who’ll come are bold enterprising sorts. What new work has been done here for the past century or longer? They’ll build the way your ancestors did, cities, caverns, life—make the Moon over.”
For they were the restless ones, the latent Faustians, he thought for the hundredth time. They found their lives on Earth empty, nothing meaningful left for them to do, and their energy and anger grew troublesome. He had wondered whether the Teramind itself had conceived this means, the Habitat, of drawing them together here where they could expend themselves in ways that were containable, controllable—in the course of lifetimes, tamable.
“They will swarm in,” Lilisaire sa d, “they will soon outvote us, and all the while they will outbreed us.”
“Nothing prevents you Lunarians from vying with them in that,” Venator said dryly.
Except, he thought, their lack of the strong urge to reproduce that was in his race, that had brought Earth to the edge of catastrophe and was still barely curbed, still a wellspring of discontent and unrest. The Habitat would give its beneficiaries some outlet for this, for some generations. Lunarians were never so fecund. Why? Was it cultural or did it have a genetic basis? Who knew? To this day, who knew? You could map the genome, but the map is not the territory, nor does it reveal what goes on underground. He himself supposed that the effect was indirect. Arrogant, self-willed people did not want to be burdened with many children.
Again Lilisaire laughed. “At last a thousandfold worn-out dispute shows a fresh face!” Lightly: “Shall we leave it to twitch? Be welcome, Captain, as a new presence in an old house. Will you take refreshment?”
He had gotten used to Lunarian shifts of mood. “Thank you, my lady.”
She poured, a clear sound against the Pan pipes, gave him his goblet of cut crystal, and raised hers. The wine glowed golden. “Uwach yei,” she toasted. It meant, more or less, “Aloft.”
“Serefe,” he responded. Rims chimed together.
“What tongue is that?” she asked.
“Turkish. To your honor.’” He sipped. It was glorious.
“You have ranged widely, then—and, I deem, as much in your person as in vivifer or quivira.”
“It is my duty,” he said dismissingly.
“What breed are you?”
Momentarily he was taken aback, then recognized the idiom she had in mind. “I was born in the southern end of Africa, my lady.”
“A stark and beautiful land, from what I have seen.”
“I was small when I left it.” If you had the synnoiotic potential, you must develop it from early childhood, or it was gone. His mind flew back to the sacrifices his parents had made—his mother giving up her career, his father, pastor in the Cosmological Christian Church, seeing him bit by bit losing God—to be with him in the Brain Garden on St Helena, give him some family life while he grew into strangeness. But parents had always surrendered themselves and their children to something larger. History knew of apprentices to shamans, the prophet Samuel, Dalai Lamas, lesser monks of many faiths, yes, boys made eunuchs because only so could they advance in the service of the Emperor. … “I do go back now and then.” It was indeed beautiful, that preserve where lions walked and grass swayed golden beneath the wind.
He must not let her pursue this subject. Lilisaire stood pensive. How much did she know or guess at? It was actually a relief when she said: “Maychance we should consider your business, that late we can take our ease. I think I would enjoy showing you about my abode.”
“I’d be fascinated,” he replied, which was no lie, although he realized he would see nothing she didn’t want him to see.
“You and your … lesser comrades?” (What intimation had she of his real status, not a simple captain among detectives but a pragmatic of determinor rank?) “have investigated Caraine and , Aiant, as well as others of the old blood.” (How quickly she had learned that!) “Now it is my turn, nay?” Her glance might have seemed candid. “Well, short and plain, I know naught of any plot to wreck the Habitat. True, you would not await that I admit it. Thus let me lay thereto that any such would be futile, stupid. Niolente herself could not in the end stay the all-devouring Federation.”
Despite her resistances, intrigues, fomented rebellion, terminal armed defiance, no. Venator wanted to say that the collapse of the sovereign Selenarchy, the establishment of the Republic, its accesssion to the World Federation and the rules of the Covenant were not merely the result of political and economic pressures. Ultimately, it was moral force. When Rinndalir left with Guthrie and Fireball began disbanding, the heart went out of too many Lunarians. Niolente’s had beaten rather lonely.
But: “We were not going to pick over dry bones, were we, my lady?” he advanced.
Lilisaire’s smile could turn unfairly seductive. “You are an intelligent man, Captain. I could come to a liking for you.”
“I certainly don’t accuse or suspect you of wrongdoing,” he said in haste. “I’m only, m-m, puzzled, and hope you can give me some illumination.”
“Ask on.” She gestured. “Shall we be seated?”
That meant more on low-g Luna than on Earth. He settled onto the divan before the table. She joined him. He was far too conscious of her nearness. A pheromonal perfume? No, surely nothing so crude, and so limited in its force.
“Taste,” she urged. He nibbled a canapé of quail’s egg and caviar. Her daintiness put him to shame.
He cleared his throat. “My service has found clues to some activity in deep space,” he said. “Probably it’s based in the asteroids, but we aren’t certain.”
He lied. He knew of no such thing, unless you counted that bitter resistance to Federation governance which died with Lilisaire’s ancestress Niolente. The service had monitored this woman as closely as it was able because it knew she was equally opposed to most of what the Federation stood for, and she was dangerous. It learned that she had been ransacking every record and database available to her, and some of her queries had come near the matter of Proserpina. If she reached it, that could prove deadly. And now she had recalled Ian Kenmuir from yonder.
“It’s not necessarily illicit,” Venator continued, “but it is undeclared, apparently secret. If it’s going to be consequential, the government naturally wants information about it.”
“Yes,” she said low, “to feed your computer models, to coordinate this also into your blandly running socioeconomic structure.”
He heard but ignored the venom. “Since you have enterprises out there, my lady,” and all the asteroid colonists were Lunarians, who could tolerate weak gravity, “I wonder if you might have some knowledge.”
Her voice became teasing. “If the undertaking be secret, how should I?”
“I don’t mean directly. Someone may have noticed something and mentioned it to you, incidentally.”
“Nay. I am too distant from those realms. I have been too long away.” Intensity: “Eyach, too long away.”
Because she must stay here to wage her hidden war?
“A forlorn hope of mine, no doubt,” he said. “And the whole thing may be a mistake, a wrong interpretation of ours.” What it was was a farce. He had no expectation of really sounding her out. He was after intangibles, personality, traits, loves, hatreds, strengths, weaknesses, her as a living person. Given that, he might better cope with her. “I’ll be very grateful if you’d look into your memory, put a search through your personal files, whatever may possibly call up something relevant.”
“Indeed I have memories. Yet you must tell me more. Thus far this is vacuum-vague.”
“I agree.” He did have specifics to offer her, concocted details that might be convincing.
“Best we range it at leisure.” Her fingers touched his wrist. She smiled afresh. “Come, you’ve barely tasted your wine, and it a pride of my house. Let us get acquainted. You spoke of your African childhood—”
He must be careful, careful. But with a mind like hers, it should not be too difficult to steer conversation away from the trivia that would betray him.
The daycycle passed. They drank, talked, wandered, dined, and went on from there.
To him, sexual activity had been an exercise desirable occasionally for health’s sake. He discovered otherwise.
She bade him farewell next mornwatch, cool as a mountain spring. He was only dimly aware of his flight back to Tychopolis. Not until he had been in oneness and cleared his head did he see how she had told him nothing meaningful, and how he might well have let slip a few inklings to her.
For a while he had even thought there was some justice on her side. But no. In the long term, hers was the fire that must be quenched. In the near future—well, Terrans had brought the Moon to life, beginning before there were any Lunarians. They had their own claim, their own rights, on this world, won for them hundreds of years ago by the likes of Dagny Beynac.