Harvest of Stars Read online

  The tone went stark. “None of you did. I know. They deep-quizzed Juan.”

  Aulard sat straight. Where he grabbed the arms of his chair, the knuckles stood hueless. “W’at?” he whispered. “Sat good old man, you drugged ’im and put pulses srough ’is brain?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You made it possible.”

  “Give me a break, Pierre. I—The Sepo handled that end of the business. They must’ve picked Juan to examine because they judged he’d be … easier. When Sayre, their head honcho, called me to say he was satisfied the secret was safe, but he’d like to run you through the mill just to make sure, I vetoed it. Christ, I’m glad I could! I told him in simple words of four letters what kinds of trouble I’d kick up if he gave you that unpleasantness, and he went along with me. But I hadn’t expected in the first place that he’d actually … do what he did. I swear by, by Juliana’s name, I didn’t.”

  “’Ow secure is se fact anyways?” Aulard asked, unrelenting. “Plenty of people remember sere were two Gussries and one was put in storage.”

  “They remember vaguely. They don’t know where. They’ve got no reason to guess it isn’t still hidden away. And pretty soon, if the question does arise, we can produce it.”

  “Yes. Anosser copy, out of a different place.” Aulard considered. “It will ’ave se software of se one sat did go into se cache, newly come ’ome from Alpha Centauri, knowing nossing of w’at ’as ’appened since.” His smile twisted. “So it will be se real Anson Gussrie.”

  “No, that’s me.”

  “Anson Gussrie would never betray as you ’ave betrayed. Many people called ’im devil, but none ever called ’im Judas.”

  The voice was not altogether level. “Pierre, you know better than that. Identity is continuity, right? I’m as much myself as, as any other is.” Louder: “How do you know that I, the hardware inside this body, I’m not the same physical object that got itself smuggled into this country to give the Avantists grief?”

  Aulard shrugged again. “Per’aps you are. It does not matter. Plain to see, sey ’ave reprogrammed you. Castrated you. Even after ’e became a revenant, Anson Gussrie was a man.”

  The robot stood mute for seconds before mumbling, “That hurt, Pierre,” and took a moment longer to add, fast, “but you’re wrong. They entered new data. I’ve learned more than I knew and changed my mind about some things. That’s all.”

  Aulard gazed into the sky. “I sink, me, you are not se one I last talked to,” he said slowly. “In sat comfortable prison room, I ’ad time to sink. W’at ’as ’appened seems rasser clear. But tell me, w’ere is se real Gussrie?”

  “Right here, God damn it!” Pause. “But if you insist, okay, my hardware here is what went to Demeter.” Softly: “Thanks to you, amigo viejo.”

  “Fine sanks!”

  “I told you I’m sorry. I haven’t changed, not really. Haven’t forgotten anything, including my friends. I’m still me, Pierre. I remember—maybe better than you, after all these years—I remember, oh, that night when we received the Epsilon Eridani probe’s first transmission from inside the system, that weird planet it’d spotted, and everybody got drunk, I had myself pulsed so I could feel drunk too, and you ran a translator program so we could follow along when you introduced us to that filthy old French song about the three goldsmiths—”

  Aulard’s hand chopped air.

  “I’m still your friend, Pierre.”

  Aulard looked back into the lenses. “And w’at of Juan Santander?” Thus might a sword have sounded as it was drawn.

  Silence.

  Aulard leaned forward. “Eh, bien?”

  Very low: “I’m sorry. He was older than you, you know. He’d grown more frail than he let on. The quizzing killed him.”

  Aulard sank back into his chair. “Murder.”

  “No! Accident! Listen, Sayre wanted him revived but that was another thing I vetoed. I figured his brain would’ve been worse damaged than—So I gave him that much, Pierre, and wished these eyes of mine could weep.”

  Aulard straightened and attacked anew. “W’at about sat osser one of you? W’ere is ’e?”

  Guthrie rallied. “You don’t need to know.”

  “Destroyed? Mutilated like you? Or—bon Dieu, let ’im stay free. Let ’im bring you down.”

  “That’s scarcely in the cards.” The stiffness softened. “Look, I had you brought here to this office because I want to spread the truth out for you to see. This is a tough time, sure, and a lot of what’s happened will always haunt me, but, well, we’re at a crisis point. The whole Sinking human race is. Let me tell you my plans, and why I’m working on them. I want your help, your advice, so we can do what’s best for everybody.”

  “You prove w’at you are,” Aulard spat. “Anson Gussrie, ’e was sometimes a bastard, but ’e was never sanctimonious.”

  Harshly: “Don’t push me too hard, old buddy. I’m on edge as is.”

  “Push? I ’ave no wish to touch you. Let me go from ’ere.”

  The lenses peered, the software made judgments. “You mean that, don’t you? Okay. I’ll be in contact later. Meanwhile, follow the newscasts. Think about them.”

  “Yes, since I must. Let me go now! Anyw’ere sat you are not.”

  Aulard climbed to his feet and stumped toward the door. A signal passed, it opened, the officers outside sprang up to meet him. “Take him back,” the robot ordered. “Treat him kindly.” The lenses remained fixed on him until the door closed.

  9

  FIRST IT WAS to lift out of the area, never mind which way, at once, before the police could organize a really thorough hunt. A bus brought Kyra and her bags to Pittsburgh Central. There she managed a conference with Guthrie, whispers in a lavabo stall.

  She asked him whether she shouldn’t try calling Quito, or perhaps some randomly chosen Fireball office abroad, on a public phone. The Avantists couldn’t have planted agents or instruments at more than a few points. Nor could the Sepo monitor more than a small fraction of communications. Let her convey the facts, then run and hide with him, to wait while Fireball acted.

  No, he replied, it was too big a risk with too small a chance of winning. Why, at the other end, should they believe so wild a story? Certainly they’d want to inquire around, investigate, get at least some degree of confirmation. This would take time and would probably come to the notice of counter-Guthrie. It might make him advance his plans by a few days, but he was bound to go to Quito soon in any case, and his presence would carry enormously more weight than fugitive allegations. The call itself could provide the Sepo with crucial clues to their quarry.

  It would be both faster and safer—if safety meant anything in this mess—to seek out reliable friends and get their help in a try to escape physically, in person. Along the way, the truth could be sown here and there, for whatever harvest it might bring.

  Kyra yielded, and spent the rest of a miserable night waiting for her train. The itinerary she’d laid out with the aid of her informant wasn’t the most direct, involving two changes, but it avoided major stations. They couldn’t microwatch every damn secondary depot between Québec and México, could they? The third stage ended in Portland, which was dicey at best. However, it stopped earlier in Salem, on the fringe of the integrate, and she’d get off there.

  Once aboard for the beginning of her trip, she collapsed into sleep more sound than she had expected. She’d had worse beds than this seat; it even reclined a bit. The maglev ran smoothly, soothingly.

  She woke to thirst and hunger, blinked, and peered out the window. The countryside through which she fled stretched wide, with occasional hills and bottomlands, flattening toward the plains farther west. It was nearly treeless but intensely green, planted row upon row upon row. She wasn’t sure of the crop, whether those tall stalks were gened for growing food or chemicals. A grid of irrigation pipes gleamed through their ranks. At a distance she glimpsed a couple of machines, perhaps monitoring, perhaps manipulating. Above
the horizon the towers of a minor city thrust into a cloudless, birdless heaven.

  “Where are we?” she wondered aloud.

  “Let me out and I’ll see,” rumbled Guthrie from his sack. She hadn’t dared leave him exposed while she was unconscious. “Right now, my environment’s as deprived as the inside of a politician’s head. I thought you’d snore forever.”

  Kyra made sure the door of the compartment was locked, lowered a tray table, and set him on it. Meanwhile she couldn’t help flushing and retorting, “I don’t snore.”

  “On what authority do you claim so? Never mind, that’s none of my business. Actually it was just a small snort now and then, ladylike—kind of sexy, in fact.”

  You old goat! she almost said, but curbed herself. That might have wounded. “Bueno, where are we?”

  He looked. “Indiana or Illinois, I’d guess. … Don’t mean anything to you? This was a federal republic once.

  People were the richer for having something closer to them than the national capital. Well, set the time on your tipster back an hour.”

  “How are you doing, sir?”

  “My battery’s holding out. I daresay you could use a recharge, though, not to mention other needs of nature. Go to ’em. Uh, first check for a newscast, will you?”

  The multi scarcely rated the name, being a tiny flatscreen and a single speaker, but when Kyra called up the listings, she found there would be info service in twenty minutes, and left Guthrie watching that channel. At the moment it presented, for classrooms, a review of earlier thinkers who preceded Xuan. Kyra had met them in her own education, political scientists tracing clear back to overrated Plato and much-maligned Machiavelli, systematist historians such as Spengler and Toynbee, psychologists from Pavlov onward who studied mind in the laboratory as a function of the organism, Moravec and Tipler and the other cybernetic visionaries. This program was banalities, pictures and phrases from which official repetition had leached meaning. “Brilliant men,” Guthrie growled. “Honest men. They gave the world treasures. Hell, Xuan himself came up with some good ideas. Not their fault their work got perverted. I daresay Jesus and Jefferson sympathize.”

  Kyra relocked the door behind her and made her way down the aisle beyond. It stank of the passengers who crowded it and filled every seat. The train purred along swift and steady, but its interior was begrimed, blotted, defaced in places, metal tarnished, upholstery worn thin or ripped, nothing much to do with what it had formerly been or what you rode in most countries. She waited seventeen minutes in line for a closet where the smell was worse and the wash water a trickle, with a sign warning it was not potable.

  The line at the vendor was longer yet, but moved at a reasonable rate. The machine declared itself out of most items on its menu. She obtained coffee of sorts, a calcium-protein drink, soy hash, toast, and fake honey, and bore them back, shoving somewhat rudely in her eagerness.

  The recintito might be little more than a wall around a couple of seats, but it gave privacy, which for the average person on Earth was a luxury comparable to live-animal meat, a visit to a forest, or a … a printed book, paper spotted and fragrant with age. Of course, a larger compartment would have been pleasant, but Lee had warned against attention-drawing comforts.

  Lee—Abruptly heart and foot stumbled. She almost dropped her tray.

  No, it wasn’t he, the man in the aisle seat, not at all like him. But oh, for an instant she’d thought it was Ivar Stranding. Same slenderness, same clear features and blond hair. … No, not really.

  She pushed on, full of swear words aimed at the turmoil within her. What kind of lepton was she, anyway? More than two years had slipped by since they broke up. And it hadn’t been that cracking serious in the three years before, though it had felt so and they’d dreamed of permanence and children and all the rest. How could it be serious between a space pilot and an engineer in the asteroids? How often did you get together, for how long at a time? Expensive multi messages lasered across the megaklicks, plus whatever other substitutes and consolations technology could provide, only made matters worse in the long run. She started turning elsewhere as chance afforded, and not just to good friends whom she hadn’t wanted to hurt by unheralded refusals. No doubt Ivar did likewise. For he could never qualify to become her partner in faring, and she could not-would not-quit her ship to be always with him. Work among the flying mountains had its challenges, yes, but it wasn’t the Long Road, it wasn’t Earth aglow over Copernicus’ ringwall or bearding Jupiter in his radiation den or a comet no life had ever betrodden before or tales and songs and fellowship at rendezvous—

  Kyra snapped the memories off. Surprise had raised them, she told herself. And she’d been vulnerable because in this splintery situation with Guthrie, she was starved for anything gentle, peaceful, secure. Which it never had been with Ivar, aside from those brief spans after making love.

  Eiko Tamura, now, aloft in L-5. No doubt Eiko had her troubles, but her spirit seemed to dwell apart from them, for how could serenity like hers be pretense? Kyra had once sent her an attempt at a poem,

  Gone sunset amberful, the lake

  Lies mirror-quiet for the pines

  That ring it round with shadow heights

  Through which a ghost of golden shines

  To burnish blue those metal bits

  Above the water, wing and wing,

  Where, silent as in space itself

  Three dragonflies are cometing.

  but never mentioned that it was Eiko she had in mind.

  The recintito welcomed her. She pressed thumb to lock and followed hard behind as the door swung aside, kicking it shut while her gaze jumped to the video screen. She’d missed the first of the newscast, but—

  Again she nearly lost her tray.

  The image was of a man big and burly, middle-aged, his broad blunt face creased and weathered, with light-blue eyes under bushy brows and thinning reddish hair. His shirt was open on a shaggy chest, beneath the jacket of an undress uniform that Fireball had not employed for generations. She knew him, she had seen this same electronic configuration fifty times if she had seen it once, and the bass tones had last tramped across her eardrums half an hour ago. “—I came to North America in my own fashion, which we needn’t describe, to observe for myself and do whatever I figured was called for. What I found rocked me back.”

  Kyra’s look swung to Guthrie in his box. He brought an eyestalk momentarily down across his speaker. Be quiet. Numbly, she lowered herself to a seat.

  “I’ll go into detail later, when I issue a full statement,” said the simulacrum of Anson Guthrie as he had been when first he became famous. It was the appearance he generated for his annual Christmas greetings to Fireball’s consortes and his infrequent public pronouncements.

  “That’ll probably be in a few days, after I’ve returned to the main offices in Quito and had a chance to confer in depth with my top directors. Meanwhile, though, I’ve been asked to make some remarks in support of the measures you’ve heard about. I don’t mind obliging.”

  His mouth drew upward, a sardonic smile. “Well, actually, I do mind, sort of. I’ve not suddenly been converted to Xuanism or any such fool thing. But I have become satisfied that there is a real danger, clear and present. A few desperados who’ve worked their way in till they’ve got access to the key networks and the powerful machineries—they can unloose forces like a major meteoroid strike.”

  A well-chosen figure of speech, Kyra thought. Everybody these days was aware of the threat in space, unlikely but unbounded, and was glad that Fireball held the World Federation contract to patrol and prevent. Which was suddenly a bit ironic, wasn’t it?

  “Sure, I favor liberty. I’ve often spouted off to that effect. But my friends have also heard me say social revolution is no way to get it. They tried that in France, 1789, Russia, 1917—why go on? The government of the North American Union is capable of reforming itself. I doubt that a martial-law regime would be, which’d follow twenty or thirty m
illion deaths. Anyhow, I wouldn’t want those deaths on my conscience. Would you? Some of you may have read what I used to reply to the really vehement advocates of population reduction, back when it looked as though the growth curve never would level off. ‘You’re right,’ I’d say. ‘The planet is grossly overpopulated and we’d better do something about it. Do you want to machine-gun the surplus yourself, or shall we start with you?’ Back then, I was also in favor of ecology, mother love, and apple pie, but had no use for the eco-fascists. I’m in favor of liberty now, but have no use for the liberation fascists.”

  Kyra didn’t recognize the last word. Guthrie was apt to throw in archaisms when he made a speech, and to ramble a bit.

  Sternness: “You have had the danger described for you, the extent of infiltration by fanatical conspirators. Later I’ll explain how I know this is true, not propaganda. Right now I haven’t the time. Neither does anybody else. We’ve got to cope, prontito. I order Fireball Enterprises to cooperate fully with the government of North America in its necessary, temporary steps to deal with this emergency. I urge and I will urge all others to do the same.”

  The image smiled afresh. “As for the good news, I repeat, these measures are temporary. Meanwhile, let me say, while I’ve got your buttonhole and free time on the air, let me say that the people who convinced me are not the hard-line Avantists, not the dinosaur faction. They’re the moderates, who understand that if the system isn’t mended it will be ended, by falling apart if nothing else. Our cooperation will strengthen them against their opponents. That’s why I decided to come out of hiding, and it’s paid off. Details later, from Quito. I do believe the occupation of our facilities can be finished inside a month, and regular operations can resume in spite of it in a week or two.

  “To everybody of good will and common sense, gracias for your patience. Adiós.”