Harvest of Stars - [Harvest of Stars 01] Read online

  “Y-yes.” The reply lagged. The lenses roved about before they steadied on him.

  Sayre smiled and spoke with great gentleness, as one did to correctees at certain stages of their re-education. “Bienvenido, Anson Guthrie. Do you know what you are?”

  “Yes, I . . . do.” The words stumbled. “I’m not, not used to it—yet—”

  “That’s all right. To be expected. Take your time. Familiarize yourself. You’ll have all the help you want. Ask any questions you wish. Your memory will show that we are completely honest with you.”

  In the silence that followed, the ventilator seemed to whisper unnaturally loudly. “You seem to have been,” said the object at length. “I feel sort of confused, but I think it’ll straighten out.”

  “It will, I’m sure. Let’s make a little test. What are you?”

  “I’m a copy—of a copy—of a copy made from a live man— But you’ve given me new information!” Sudden strength rang forth. “I was wrong. I didn’t understand the situation, nor what Xuan was getting at, not really. I’ll have to think more about that, but—” The voice trailed off. After a minute: “Well, Sayre, my mind is changed. We’re allies. Thanks. I guess.”

  * * * *

  4

  A

  knock sounded. Lee and Kyra tucked Guthrie in the closet before they admitted the servant. He wheeled in a dinner cart, set the meal forth, salaamed, and left them. They brought their lord out and settled down to eat.

  Kyra discovered she was ravenous. Seasoned lamb, pilaf, eggplant, pita, cucumber salad dressed with yogurt, sweet side dishes, soured milk, fruit sherbet, coffee, all were prepared in ways strange to her but tasted supreme. Lee said it was traditional fare. These folk must have gone to considerable trouble and expense getting their nanotanks programmed for the ingredients. Maybe they bought some from an actual farm.

  Nourishment restored hopefulness and, for a while, kept exhaustion at bay. After the servant, summoned by a buzzer, had removed the debris, talk began to range freely, beyond matters of escape and comeback.

  Lee seemed to gain less animation than Kyra. When she remarked on it, he explained wryly, “This isn’t my kind of escapade. I’ve led a pretty quiet life.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “You’ve knocked around with lots of odd people, haven’t you? And gotten familiar with ‘em, too, which is more than I, probably could.”

  “Bueno, my work demands that.”

  Yes, she thought, an intuitionist had to be a peculiar combination of intellect and sensitivity. S/he must possess a basic grasp not just of modern science and technology but of society; not just history, diagrammed structures, analyzed dynamics, but individual human beings; not just the High World but enough of the relatively backward cultures and subcultures that s/he could see—no, feel—something of their interactions with it. On that basis s/he was supposed to develop models and write programs, to generate ideas and make proposals that had a fair likelihood of being partially right. S/he might thus anticipate the results of some change, especially on the human level, and indicate ways to forestall or mitigate those that were undesirable.

  Guthrie had created the profession, Kyra remembered. He set in motion the first studies and experiments, then the first recruitments. Fireball gained so much thereby, even at that early stage, that other companies were quick to imitate, and finally governments did. She harked back to a lesson in school. As part of her education, she was to know about this, whether or not it ever impinged directly on her. Guthrie himself had recorded the lecture. He didn’t appear in the multi. A faceless box wouldn’t appeal to youngsters, and he reserved re-creations of his mortal image for occasions more special. Artfully prepared scenes accompanied the homely voice.

  * * * *

  “The classic example from the past is the automobile. You’ve seen it in historicals, a live-piloted ground vehicle fuelled by hydrocarbons. It became practical and started taking over from the horse in a single generation. Well, any fool in those days could’ve seen that happening. A smart fellow could’ve predicted that this’d lead to a major industry. The subsidiary industries, like oil and highway work, would join in to make a combination that’d dominate the economies of whole nations. But I don’t believe anybody planned for oil reserves gaining vital strategic importance, till possession of them was suddenly one of the considerations that wars were being fought over. The explosion of suburbs and the dry rotting of inner cities, strangulated traffic, air not fit to breathe, all these caught people more or less by surprise. I’ll barely mention a revolution in sexual styles, to titillate you and make you want to study further on your own.

  “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 simpatico 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 overwhelmed it, unwinking brilliances, colors clear, steel-blue Vega, amber Arcturus, smoldering coal that was Betelgeuse. The Milky Way torren
ted 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 maximo. “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. We, 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 gla
nced 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.