Harvest of Stars Read online

  “I don’t say the auto was the exclusive cause of all this, but it sure had a lot to do with it. Nor do I say the auto should’ve been suppressed, or kept for an elite while hoi polloi crammed into public transit. But with foresight, assorted entrepreneurs could’ve done plenty of good and, not so incidentally, made plenty of money.

  “For instance, the internal combustion engine was a ghastly mistake. With a proper flash boiler, which wouldn’t have been hard to engineer, steam could’ve edged it out, burning a great deal cleaner. Autos could’ve been banned in city centers early on. The public would’ve gone along with that if small, nimble runabouts like our bubbletrikes had been available. This would have helped keep the cities pleasant to live in, and they might have sprawled less.

  “I repeat, there wouldn’t have been any final answers. No doubt the solutions would’ve generated problems of their own. Brains by themselves aren’t enough. That they are, that’s the grand perennial delusion of the intellectuals. But damn it, our brains were meant to be used!

  “Now think about your world today. Look around you and think. Tech innovations; changing relationships between institutions; as simple-seeming a question as where to locate a new facility; a human race as fragmented and tumbled-about as pieces in a kaleidoscope.” The multi showed that forgotten toy in action. It carried more impact than conventional pictures of fractals and chaotic systems. “Don’t you agree we need people who consider these matters, not just in words and numbers and equations and charts, but with their guts?” His metaphor for the entire organism was equally striking. “They can’t hand us a planned optimum course, and what they do offer is often wrong and always incomplete. But they make one Jupiter of a difference. Believe me, they do.”

  Kyra glanced at Lee. He looked too young to be that important. Of course, he was merely one among many. Like the rest, he concentrated on knowledge of a given area, which was why he lived where he did. Most of his overt work he performed at home, on the computer or in his head. But it required more than quantitative data. He must get out, make a point of meeting a variety of folk, cultivate them, develop a sense of their thoughts and feelings, the unspoken as well as what they could express in words.—

  He needed to be simpático and observant, she thought. Which he pretty clearly was.

  Recollection and reflection had shot past while he was saying: “You’ve had the real adventures.”

  “Not when I could help it,” she laughed.

  “An explorer in old days on Earth, Amundsen, claimed that adventure is what happens to the incompetent,” Guthrie added.

  “You know what I mean,” Lee argued in his earnest fashion. “Tahir said it. You, Pilot Davis, you’ve walked on Mars,”—

  (Halfway up Olympus Mons, vision swept across rocky vastness to a subtlety of desert hues, rolling away beneath rose-petal heaven. Hazed by a dust storm that glinted in sharp daylight, a crater reared like a castle guarding the edge of creation.)

  —“asteroids, comets,”—

  (A stride set her afloat. The worldlet was little more than a darkness, faintly a-sheen where a crest jutted out of shadow, a piece torn from the sky that otherwise encompassed her. Stars filled that night, their multitudes over-whelmed it, unwinking brilliances, colors clear, steel-blue Vega, amber Arcturus, smoldering coal that was Betelgeuse. The Milky Way torrented in frost and silence. Then as she flew, the shrunken sun hove in sight, and her helmet stopped radiance down to save her eyes. She barely descried the outermost flight feathers of its zodiacal wings, and a spark that was a planet.)

  —“and beyond.”

  (The ice of Enceladus glittered as if stars had been strewn over it, from a scarp at the left rim of vision to the near horizon on the right. Few shone overhead. Saturn drowned them, topplingly huge, tawny-bright, emblazoned with cloud-bands and with swirls that were cyclopean storms. Almost edge on, the rings were not the jewel-work she beheld elsewhere but an unfading meteor-streak across her whole viewfield. Two sister moons gleamed, drawn scimitars. Through silence she heard her pulse beating. Tears stung. When she blinked, they caught in her lashes and Saturn made rainbows of them.)

  “I’ve been a tourist twice on Luna, once in L-5,” Lee said. “Otherwise the universe outside Earth exists for me only in books, the multiceiver, and the vivifer.”

  “I was lucky in that regard,” Guthrie reminisced. “In my salad days there were still places on Earth where the nights were decently black. Sometimes in the mountains, especially, looking up from my sleeping bag, I’d feel how this globe was a tiny dancer amongst a billion billion campfires.”

  Kyra wondered if that was what had first turned his dreams spaceward. She thought of herself groundside, straining to make out a few wan pinpoints. Too damn many lights, wherever you went. Even in midocean, they fogged the dark and glared down from orbit. Too many people.

  “Not that I’m sorry for myself,” Lee said hastily. “I know how fortunate I am, to do interesting work well rewarded.”

  Fortunate indeed, Kyra agreed. Most had had their existence automated into meaninglessness. Before they were born, usually.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t trade my life for anything,” she admitted. Thought ran on: The wild luck was hers and her colleagues’. They could steer ships because those ships were ninety-nine percent robotic. It wouldn’t take much development to make that a hundred percent and retire every human spacer. From a purely economic standpoint, no doubt it should already have happened. But Guthrie vetoed it. He must have done so. Nobody else had that power in the confidential councils of Fireball.

  Why did he? Romanticism, clinging to the triumphs of the past? A feudal ideal of the obligations of a master to his underlings? Maybe. She suspected that wasn’t all. He hadn’t lasted till now without being a shrewd realist. Living creatures like her could serve him better when the chips were down than any machines.

  No sense losing herself in ponderings grown trite during her voyages alone. Let her pursue this conversation. Incredibly, here she was in a threesome that included the jefe máximo. “But I do envy you a bit, the variety of folk you’ve met,” she confided to Lee. “In space, everybody’s High World.”

  He smiled. “Necessarily.”

  “That doesn’t mean we don’t get plenty of rambunctious originals out there,” Guthrie said.

  “Yes, I know,” Lee replied. “Quite apart from the Lunarians, spacers are bound to think for themselves.”

  Kyra laughed again. “Often we haven’t anything else to do.”

  Lee studied her a moment before venturing diffidently, “What are your special interests, may I ask?”

  “I’d be interested to hear, myself,” Guthrie said. “If we’re in the soup together, we may as well get acquainted.”

  Kyra’s cheeks heated. While not self-effacing, she had seldom received this kind of close attention. “Assorted sports,” she related with a shrug. “Music. I play the sonor and an archaic wind instrument called the recorder, and I sing—mostly ancient ballads—not very tunefully. I read a lot, as you’d expect, and scribble a bit.”

  That seemed to catch at Lee. “Really? You write? What?”

  “Nothing special,” Kyra mumbled. “Not for presentation. Doggerel, mainly. Archaic also, sonnets, sestinas, that sort of thing.”

  Eiko Tamura said they were good. But Eiko was too kindly. Her own work, even rendered into English and thus mutilated, haiku, prose sketches—yes, and the drawings, the calligraphy—sent currents through Kyra’s spine and out to her nerve-ends. The two of them got together every time she was in L-5. Communications laser-borne between them were apt to print out several pages long.

  Kyra tossed her head. “Ay de mi,” she exclaimed as cheerily as she was able, “I’m beginning to sound like one of the jefe’s despised intellectuals. Actually, as for a significant activity, I give my computer a mean game of ortho or heisenberg, and my friends an expensive game of poker.”

  Apparently Lee welcomed lightness. “Poker? The card game? Why, I play that. W
e, a few others and I, have a little club that meets monthly on the net.”

  “It’s more fun in the flesh,” Kyra told him. “Then we deal, by turns, not the computer.” And they were together, breathing the same air, drinking the same beer, swapping the same shopworn joke phrases.

  Lee sighed. “I know, but such an opportunity is rare.”

  Was she, on a long mission with nothing for company but her ship’s half-intelligence and the occasional time-lagged message, ever as lonely as he perhaps was always? “Let’s organize a party, once this hooraw is over,” she suggested.

  “Put me in a robot, and I’d like to sit in,” Guthrie said. “I remember some epic games when I was human.”

  When he was human. What pain prowled under those four words?

  Maybe none. He had freely chosen to be what he was. He could undo his being whenever he wanted.

  Or could he?

  His voice reached after her. “You’ve wandered off, Davis. Are you okay?”

  Crack, she thought, had she been Q-jumping long enough that they noticed? She shook herself. “What you said, sir,” she confessed. Truthfully, if not quite candidly: “I was reminded of the history you’ve seen and, yes, been. It, bueno, rushed over me.”

  “‘There’s rosemary,’” he murmured, “‘that’s for remembrance; pray you, love, remember; and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.’”

  “Hamlet?” she blurted in startlement.

  Did he sound the least bit defensive? “Uh-huh. I’m not the unalloyed bullhead they take me for. Back then, too, I did my share of reading. It wasn’t the fashionable stuff, no. Shakespeare, Homer, Cervantes, they might be acceptable, if outmoded, but Kipling, Conrad, MacDonald, Heinlein, that ilk, they were insensitive reactionaries. Or racists or sexists or whatever the current swear word was. You see, they dealt with things that mattered.”

  Kyra wondered what inputs he enjoyed these days. Lee must have learned something about that.

  The intuitionist yawned. “Excuse me,” he said.

  “A natural thing to do,” Guthrie assured him, “and not just because I’m maundering on.”

  “It’s fascinating,” Kyra said. At once: “I’m not trying to kowtow sir.”

  “I know,” Guthrie replied. “But Bob’s right. Or his body is, whatever his forebrain supposes. You need rest, you two, if you’re to be fit for anything tomorrow.”

  “And you, sir?”

  “Likewise.” How Guthrie would pass the night, he left unspoken.

  Talk survived a span longer, increasingly desultory, decreasingly informative. It was Kyra who took the initiative. “Bueno, I’m totalmente outgewashed.” She rose. “Ho for that promised shower, and eight or nine hours of the best. Unless you’d rather go first, Bob?” They had gotten on first-name terms. Guthrie was still “jefe,” but for her the title had gained a certain comfortableness.

  “No, gracias,” Lee said. “I have an idea about what we should do that I want to mull over for a few minutes.”

  “Okay, I’ll keep my mouth shut,” Guthrie offered—the mouth he no longer had.

  A cataract of hot water was sheer hedonism. Kyra wallowed. As she toweled herself, she luxuriated in the steam she inhaled.

  Coming forth aglow, she saw Lee’s face. Instantly he looked away, as if something had caught his eye. Amused, she glanced at his lap. Yes. She’d forgotten how the Avantists frowned on nudity and forbade it in public. Sensuality of any kind distracted humans from what should be their pleasure as well as their duty, to order their minds so that they and their descendants might build the rational society which would be the germ of the Noösphere.

  Poor Bob. He couldn’t altogether resist the creed, surrounded by it. Besides, Xuan’s system had its attractions. If nothing else, it embodied the same sociodynamic matrices with which he worked, and added more.

  She hastened to get into bed, under cover. “Buenas noches,” she said, and closed her eyes. She kept them closed while he visited the cubicle, returned, switched off the light, and cautiously lay down. She saw and felt him breathe.

  Temptation stirred. It had been quite a while. But no. A bad idea, under these conditions. Maybe later. He really was rather sweet.

  Too much so, too gentle? He’d shown himself plenty brave, but that didn’t rule out an inner tenderness which might prove fatally disadvantaging. After all, while he had spent his life in North America, lived and worked among its citizens, he was Fireball. She suspected, from his style, that he too was Fireball born and raised. Then probably all the people were whom he felt closest to. He might join them over the phone more often than in the flesh, but they were his amigos, his true compadres; and he knew that troth worked both ways and if trouble came upon him he would have the mighty company at his back. So he could afford a certain trustfulness that the ordinary North American no longer could.

  This situation had brought on a great deal of the conflict, Kyra mused. There was always some friction between Fireball and every government, even Ecuador’s. No government liked any of those over whom it claimed authority bearing a deeper allegiance to an outside power than to its own politicians and caudillos. Most could tolerate that, however, especially the democratic ones. It didn’t threaten them any more than did allegiances to a worldwide religion or a worldwide interest group. But Avantism, which wanted to organize everything—ultimately, all human minds—according to Xuan’s doctrine, Avantism was seriously inconvenienced by the daily presence of a system that was different and that flourished.

  Yes, Fireball was altogether different, the creation of a rambunctious individualist whose machine ghost continued to rule over it. More than a set of profit-making enterprises, it was a society, a way of thinking and living—a nation, Dad said once. A nation whose folk were allowed, encouraged, to think, speak, act for themselves, yet which bound them together in loyalties stronger than law. A nation whose head set an example utterly noneconomic, nonaltruistic, nonrational, and was cheered for it, when he not only sponsored missions to the stars, which was justifiable as scientific research, but went to Alpha Centauri in person. (Bueno, as a copy of himself, but it came to the same thing.) It wasn’t as if yonder planet Demeter promised the slightest material gain for anybody at any time before its doom came upon it.

  Still, the Avantists had managed. Fireball didn’t actively try to subvert them, and they depended on Fireball as much as Earth in general did. The relationship was uneasy, but it worked after a fashion. Then why had the Avantists suddenly lashed out? Why, first, their occupation of North American headquarters, and now of everything Fireball had within their jurisdiction?

  Because they’d learned about Guthrie’s duplicate and wanted it for their own purposes, and one thing led to another. But surely this was a desperate move.

  They were desperate, Kyra thought.

  They were totalitarians. Hitherto she had not quite appreciated what that meant. It had been something in her history lessons when she was a schoolgirl. Oh, she heard analogies drawn between the Avantists and the Jin Dynasty, the Incas, the Communists, and so forth, but it had seemed pretty abstract. She heard of abuses, and had once met a victim who’d escaped to Brazil. (He had been a physicist, rather reckless in expressing his opinions. After what had been done to his brain, he was taking any kind of menial work he could get.) But in several other countries on Earth, dissenters also flew a dangerous orbit.

  She should have asked her parents more carefully just why they had moved to Russia. She should have asked herself just why any country needed to make ideological nonconformity a crime, and maintain a Security Police against it, and send offenders to prison or to revision treatment. Then she would have understood beforehand how this government had cornered itself.

  Measures like that were necessary if you were to march your people into the paradise your system promised them; but in today’s world you couldn’t keep it up forever. A global, no, interplanetary economy required they go back and forth across your borders, thousands and thousands
every day; an interplanetary communications net kept them awash in information from abroad; they saw they were being ordered about with little benefit, and they saw that elsewhere were more freedom and prosperity. They grew disillusioned. Some of them muttered complaints, and you labelled such persons Chaotics, reactionaries who would fain throw history back into randomness. Did certain among these begin secretly gathering weapons and plotting revolution?

  Kyra didn’t know. She simply thought that the Avantists must have stumbled on an opportunity for a wild, daring gamble, and taken it because it was their last chance. Which didn’t mean they couldn’t do a lot of killing and wasting before they went under. It didn’t even mean they couldn’t win their bet and take charge of the whole human race. Far-fetched, no doubt, but possible.

  Infierno! She was making herself wakeful. To what purpose? None. Relax. What she needed was a night’s rest. Subvocally she recited the mantra that should put her to sleep.

  5

  “DATELINE FUTURO,” RATTLED from the newscaster’s lips. “Yesterday the government seized all properties of Fireball Enterprises in the North American Union. Militia are in occupation and Security Police units have entered the key facilities.” Scenes flashed by. Northeast Integrate, the World Trade Center shining renovated like an island amidst reefs and wreckage, flitters hovering above, troops and guns on the roof. Toronto Compound, Kyra’s birth home, uniformed men standing guard along a street of neat little dwellings while children passed anxiously on their way back from school. Southwest Energy Central, a desert forested with receivers that waited for Moonrise and the power they would drink, armored vehicles now squatting beneath them. Kamehameha Spaceport, a glimpse of blue sea and white surf, a ship tall on her pad, several technicians herded from her by a squad whose hands brushed holstered shock guns.