Fog rolled in during the night. By sunrise it had cloaked Guthrie House in a gray-white where the closest trees, two or three meters from a window, were shadows and everything else was formless. Air lay cold and damp and very quiet. You could just hear the hush of waves along the shore and perhaps a dripping from the eaves.
At breakfast Matthias, Kenmuir, and Aleka exchanged no more than muttered greetings, for it was plain to see that the lodgemaster wanted silence. But when the last cup of coffee had been drained, he rose and growled, “Follow me.” The others went after his bulk, out into the hall, up the stairs, down another hall to a certain door which he opened, and through. He closed it behind them.
“I believe it’s right we talk here,” he said.
Kenmuir and Aleka glanced about. Unlighted save for what seeped through the fog from a hidden sun, the room would have been dim were its walls and ceiling not so white. A few ancient pictures decorated it, family scenes, landscapes, a view of Earth from orbit. Drapes hung at the tall windows. The floor was bare hardwood. Furniture was sparse and likewise from early times, four chairs, a dresser, a cabinet, a bed. In one corner stood a man-high mechanical clock. Its pendulum swung slowly and somehow inexorably; the ticking seemed loud in this stillness.
A chill ran through Kenmuir. The hair stood up on his arms. He knew where he was.
“For privacy?” Aleka was asking.
“No,” Matthias replied. “I told you, the estate is spyproof and everybody on it is a sworn consorte. But here is where mortal Anson Guthrie died.”
Her eyes grew large. She made a sign that Kenmuir did not recognize.
Then she looked more closely at Matthias, stooped shoulders, lines graven deeper than before in a face where the nose stood forth like a mountain ridge, and murmured, “You really didn’t sleep much, did you?”
“There’ll be time for that later,” he said. “All the time in the universe.”
Heavily, he sat down and gestured his visitors to do so. They put their chairs side by side. Aleka’s hand found Kenmuir’s. What comfort flowed from hers into his!
Matthias raised his head. “But we haven’t much of it just now,” he warned. “The hunters don’t know you’re here. If they did, we’d be under arrest already. They’re searching, though, and surveying, and thinking. Before long, Venator or a squad of his will return. Meanwhile, if you leave in any ordinary way, you’ll surely be spotted. Disguises won’t help. They’ll stop everyone for a close look.”
The eeriness tingled again down Kenmuir’s spine. “There’s a way that’s not ordinary?”
“You’ll help us, señor?” Aleka joined in.
Matthias nodded. “What little I can. Or, rather, I’ll hope to help the cause of freedom.”
“You decided this last night?” Kenmuir asked, and realized at once how stupid the question was.
Matthias’s voice marched on, toneless but clocksteady. “It wasn’t easy. I’ll be breaking a promise as old as the Trothdom and as strong as any I ever gave. And it may be for nothing, or it may be for the worse. Why are they so determined to keep Proserpina from us? I should think if the Lunarians got knowledge of it, access to it, they wouldn’t oppose the Habitat—at least, not with force enough to matter. And the Habitat is our way to the stars.” He breathed for a moment. “Or is it? I don’t know, I don’t know.”
Aleka heard the pain. She released Kenmuir’s hand and reached over to grasp his.
He closed the great knobbly paw about hers and held it for two or three heartbeats before he let go. A smile ghosted briefly over his lips. “Gracias, querida,” he sighed. “I did think about you too, and your people.”
Resonantly: “And I thought over and over how high-handed, how unlawful Venator’s gang is being. If the Federation government can do this to us, concealing a fact that would change thousands of lives, maybe change the course of history, what else is it doing? What will it do next? Guthrie used to quote a proverb about not letting the camel’s nose into your tent. I think more than its nose is in. Bloody near the whole camel is. Or soon will be, if we sit meek.”
“Could they have a decent reason for the secrecy?” she asked low.
Kenmuir spoke. Anger had been crystallizing in him too, sharp and cold. “At best, they aren’t even offering that much of an excuse. They’re treating us like children.”
“Children of the cybercosm,” Matthias agreed. “Or wards, or pets, or domestic animals.”
Trouble trembled in Aleka’s face and words. “Most people feel free and happy.”
“Most dogs do,” Matthias said.
“I’m not against you, señor. I just can’t help wondering—the larger good, also for my people—”
“Either we act or we don’t,” Kenmuir snapped.
“Yes.” She straightened. “Bueno, let’s act, then, and take the responsibility for whatever comes of it, like—like free adult humans.”
Kenmuir decided he should utter another question whose answer he was almost sure of, if only to get it out of the way. “Could we simply broadcast what we know? I suppose Guthrie House has the equipment. It’s got plenty of every other kind I can think of.”
“I considered that,” Matthias admitted. “No. It wouldn’t be any real use. I’ve lived on Earth and dealt with the powers that be long enough to have learned what works, and how, and what doesn’t work. A bare statement like that—too easily denied, and guided down the public memory hole. Meanwhile Venator and his merry men would have seized us. They might all too well pick up clues to Fireball’s secret, and go blot it out.”
Kenmuir’s fists clenched. Aleka half sprang to her feet, sank back down, and whispered, “Ian’s told me about—the Founder’s Word?”
“Yes.” The Rydberg’s voice tolled. “It came to me near the end of this night what I must do. Then I could sleep for a bit. It’s right that this be where.”
The sanctuary, the shrine, Kenmuir thought.
The hands of the clock reached XII and VII. It boomed forth the hour. A breeze outside made the fog swirl at the windows like smoke.
“Not that the knowledge will necessarily save you,” Matthias went on. “Odds are that it won’t. If you think the gamble is sheerly loco, I swear you never to speak of this again, not even between yourselves, not ever again.”
“I swear,” Aleka said as if it were a prayer.
“By my troth,” Kenmuir declared.
“And yet the story is the story of a vow that was broken,” Matthias said.
They waited.
After a minute had ticked away, he continued: “Lars Rydberg promised his mother Dagny Beynac that if she’d download, then when the download’s work was done he’d wipe its program and give it oblivion. The download itself asked him to, and again he promised.”
“But he didn’t?” Aleka breathed while Kenmuir’s pulse stumbled.
“No. When at last he’d turned the network off and stood alone with it, there where they’d said goodbye—he’d kissed the hard box between its optic stalks—he thought about what it, no, she had done. How she’d piloted Luna and, yes, Earth through the revolution, how without her it could easily have become catastrophe, how precarious the situation still was and how sorely she might be needed. To her, switchoff was the same as wipeout, unless she was reactivated. He told the world he’d done what he said he would, and he brought her to Dagny’s tomb to rest by Dagny’s ashes, and with everything he was he hoped it could be forever. But he bore the burden of this to his grave.”
“He shared it with a son of his,” Aleka knew.
“Yes. In case, just in case. And so onward through time.”
“She never was called back,” Aleka concluded. “The secret became a Fireball tradition, no more. Going to Luna and redeeming Lars’s promise, that must have appeared to later Rydbergs like breaching their own.”
“Till now.”
“Raising her—” Kenmuir croaked out of a dry throat.
“She, alive, certainly knew about Proserpina,” Matthias said. “She must have heard or seen written down what its orbital elements are. She probably remembered them—always had a strong memory, the biographies tell—and therefore her download did too. Anyhow, closely enough that any astronomer or spacefarer could easily find it. Once that information is out, the hoarding of the truth is finished.”
For whatever value it might have to Lilisaire, Kenmuir thought. But never mind. He was committed, as much to Aleka and her cause as to anyone or anything else, including an end to his own outlawry. “You’ll send an agent?” he asked.
Matthias didn’t seem to have heard him, but proceeded: “This may be quite useless, understand. The download has lain there for centuries. The tomb won’t have screened out all the cosmic radiation, and there’s the inherent background too. Mutilated chips, scrambled electronics, cumulative damage never repaired. By now, maybe nothing that will function is left.”
“Or maybe a dement—” Horror wrenched out of Aleka. “Oh, no!”
“Maybe not,” Kenmuir reassured her. “In fact, from what I know of such things, I’d guess the chances are good that the system’s still in working order.” He spoke with more confidence than he felt.
Aleka grimaced. “Don’t call her a system.”
“I’m prepared to have you try, and shoulder my share of whatever guilt will follow,” Matthias said. “Are you?”
It thrilled in Kenmuir. “Yes.”
Aleka blinked back tears. “Yes.”
“But your idea of sending an agent—No, I’m afraid not,” Matthias said.
“Why?” Kenmuir inquired.
“Think.” Matthias had had the night, alone, in which to do so. “None of the staff here are qualified. I’d have to call someone in, and brief him not only on the mission but on the technical details. That’s an antique machine, don’t forget. Nothing like it is in use today. And he’d need equipment. Now we can be certain Guthrie House is under remote but highresolution robotic surveillance, at the minimum. Do you imagine anybody could leave here with a mess of gear, take passage for Luna, and go out to Dagny’s tomb—isolated, the holiest ground on the Moon—without Venator knowing? And acting?”
“And … wiping the program,” Aleka said.
“And coming here for us,” Kenmuir added. “But, um, couldn’t the man simply tell Lilisaire in her castle? She might be able to do something. If not enter the tomb, then instigate a search for Proserpina.”
“In due course, if all else fails, that can be tried,” Matthias said without enthusiasm. “I’ll arrange for an encrypted message to a trustworthy man, with instructions to decrypt it and convey it after a given length of time, when perhaps Venator’s corps is less vigilant. But I’d not be hopeful. If they haven’t found a pretext to arrest her, which I expect they will have, she’ll at least stay under close watch. Remember, they know that you know the asteroid exists. Could she or any of her kind mount a search, astronomical or in spacecraft, even by Lunarians in the outer System, without Venator guessing what they were about and moving to stop them? I doubt it.”
“And meanwhile we’ll have failed, and be done for.” Once more Kenmuir had a sense of fingers closing on him.
Aleka struck them aside. “But you have a way, señor. You must, or you wouldn’t have spoken.”
“Yes,” Matthias answered, and abruptly his voice sounded almost young. “A mad way, a wild hunt, but it might work, it barely might work.”
Understanding flashed into Kenmuir. “Kestrel!” he yelled.
Aleka stared at him. “What?”
He could not stay seated, he leaped up and paced, to and fro, arousal going through him in surges like the sea waves out beyond the mists. “The spacecraft, the relic, Kyra Davis’s ship. We keep it always ready to lift—”
She gasped.
Matthias’s tones quickened: “Including spacesuits, modern self-adjusting ones, EVA drive packs, and everything else.” Otherwise the symbolism would have been hollow. Suddenly Kenmuir realized, fully, why the Trothdom had fought, and paid a high price in things yielded during negotiations, for the right to maintain an antimatter-powered vessel on Earth. Kestrel was not the first sacred object in human history. Of course, any launch was forbidden. He heard through his blood: “A short flight, if you can pilot her, Captain Kenmuir.”
“I can study it up,” he said, faintly amazed at the levelness of his voice. “You have vivifer material about that model, so we won’t have to tap the public database, don’t you?”
“But the whole world will see!” Aleka exclaimed.
Matthias grinned. “Right. Something that spectacular can’t be kept entirely off the news, and the Teramind itself will be hard put to explain it away.”
Sobriety slid into Kenmuir’s passion. “Unless Venator’s service heads me off in time.”
“They have craft with far greater capabilities, true, and they’ll react fast,” Matthias said. “But you’ll take them by surprise, and they won’t know where you’re bound till you’ve landed. Then you’ll have to be quick, oh, yes.”
In for a penny, in for a pound. Kenmuir laughed aloud. “We’ll plan the operation. You can get data on what Authority units are currently stationed where or in which orbits, can’t you? That’s public information. And I’ve got an idea about how to keep them from silencing me once they’ve caught me. Come, let’s get busy!”
“’Auwē no hō’i ē,” Aleka murmured. “You surprise me, you do. I didn’t expect I’d ever see you in a state like this.”
“I’ve work ahead of me,” was all Kenmuir could find to say.
She rose and regarded him closely. “One thing, amigo. What’s this ‘I’? You’re not going alone.”
His pacing jarred to a halt. “What? You? Untrained and—and vulnerable—No, ridiculous.”
“I’m a quick study,” Aleka said. “I can learn what I’ll need to be of some help.” She addressed Matthias. “Can’t I, señor?”
The Rydberg smiled. “I believe you had better have a partner, Captain Kenmuir. I’m too decrepit. This lass strikes me as being potentially the most competent person we have on hand.”
“Besides,” Aleka told them, “it’s my mission too. And, and, Pele’s teeth, Ian, I won’t let you go without me!”