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Harvest of Stars
[Harvest of Stars 01]
By Poul Anderson
Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU
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DRAMATIS PERSONAE
(Some minor figures are omitted)
Dolores Almeida Candamo:General director of Earthside operations for Fireball
Enterprises.
Arren: Lunarian, an agent of Rinndalir.
Pierre Aulard: An engineer and a director of Fireball.
Jack Bannon: An officer of the (Chaotic) Liberation Army.
Gabriel Berecz: The download of an ecologist.
Esther Blum: Regent of the Homesteaders.
Jerry Bowen: Designer of the laser launch system.
Charissa: A settler’s daughter, later wife to Hugh Davis.
Charlie: A male of the Keiki Moana.
Cua: Lunarian, a space pilot.
Erling Davis: A descendant of Hugh Davis.
Hugh Davis: A ranger on Demeter.
Kyra Davis: A space pilot and consorte of Fireball; her download.
Demeter Daughter.
Demeter Mother.
Rory Donovan: A bartender in Tychopolis.
Manuel Escobedo Corrigan:President of the North American Union.
Anne Farnum: A Chaotic.
Jim Farnum: A Chaotic.
Hans Gieseler: An employee of Fireball.
Anson Guthrie:Co-founder and master of Fireball Enterprises; his downloads; his
reincarnation.
Juliana Trevorrow Guthrie:Wife to Anson Guthrie and co-founder of Fireball
Enterprises.
—Helledahl: Captain of the Fireball spaceship Bruin.
Felix Holden: A colonel in the North American Security Police.
Isabu: Lunarian, an agent of Rinndalir.
Robert E. Lee: An intuitionist and consorte of Fireball.
—Leggatt: A magnate within Quark Fair.
Lin Mei-Ling: Wife of Wang Zu and consorte of Fireball.
Luis Moreno Quiroga:A friend of Anson Guthrie in his youth.
Sitabhai Lai Mukerji:President of the World Federation.
Boris Ivanovich Nikitin:A friend of Kyra Davis in her girlhood.
Niolente: Lunarian, ally of Rinndalir.
Noboru: Child of Demeter Daughter.
Christian Packer: A descendant of Jeff Packer.
Jeff Packer: A son of Washington Packer.
Washington Packer: Director of Kamehameha Spaceport and consorte of Fireball.
—Pedraza: An officer of the North American Security Police.
Consuelo Ponce: A scientist and consorte of Fireball.
Rinndalir: Lunarian, a Selenarch.
Basil Rudbeck:Director of research at Lifthrasir Tor.
Rusaleth: Lunarian, Lady Commander in Phyle Ithar.
Juan Santander Conde:A director of Fireball, eventually emeritus.
Enrique Sayre: Head of the North American Security Police.
Ivar Stranding: A former lover of Kyra Davis.
— Stuart: Captain of the Fireball spaceship Jacobite.
Zeyd Abdullah Aziz Tahir:A sheikh of the Muslim community in Northwest
Integrate.
Eiko Tamura: A technician in L-5 and employee of Fireball.
Noboru Tamura: Father of Eiko Tamura, chief of space operations in L-5 and
consorte of Fireball.
Nero Valencia: A gunjin of the Sally Severins.
Wang Zu: A dispatcher in L-5 and consorte of Fireball.
Xuan Zhing: Visionary on whose theories the Avantist movement was founded.
Clarice Yoshikawa: A technician in the North American Security Police.
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EPILOGUE
E
ven last night, death was no more than the brightest of the stars. The suns have drawn close together in the sky, as if to hide themselves from that which nears, and Phaethon was lord of the dark. Outshining Sol, its whiteness stood like a light kindled in a prayer for peace, a beauty almost too great to bear. Strengthening hour by hour, it was still clear to unaided sight when it set at midmorning.
We will not shelter our awareness on dayside. There is no shelter. We will be here, beholding. I will do whatever I can to calm the terror of my poor beasts, who must see and not understand.
The weather has been calm. Snow decked the hills, their glens were full of blue shadow, trees gone leafless bore icicles that shivered light into a thousand colored brilliances. But some clouds came to veil the west, and our last sunset flamed. Now a wind has sprung up, shrill and keen. A dust of ice grains drifts across the land. Through roots and rock I feel how monstrously the seas rage afar.
Phaethon’s radiance goes before it, a pallor that mounts from the southeast until it touches the zenith. Birds rouse at this strange dawn, I hear them calling their wonderment; a stag bugles, wolves howl.
I must help my creatures. Abide me. I love you.
—And I love you. I’ll wait.
The planet starts to rise. So huge has it grown that more than an hour passes before it is aloft. Meanwhile it swells further. Gibbous, it is wanly aglow on its night part, where starlight falls on its own-troubled weather; but in the eyes that are left among us, it has drowned every star. The day part dazzles, a writhing of storms between which I glimpse mountain ranges, glaciers, and frozen oceans melting. Our snow glisters begemmed. Eastward, thunderheads rear. Phaethon makes phosphorescent their battlements. Lightning plays in their depths. Unnatural at the heart of winter—no, this too is nature, is the reality to which we belong.
The ground shudders. Wind shrieks. I bring what comfort I may to hawk and hare, fox and crow, vole and sparrow. They will not have long to be afraid, but I will spare them as much as I can.
Black spots appear on Phaethon: smoke, ash. Volcanoes have awakened in hordes. A line races across the disc, jagged, a crack open on molten depths. A quake billows beneath us. Hillsides crash down, louder than the oncoming hurricane.
I return. Our spirits embrace.
Phaethon begins to sunder. It will strike before it breaks fully apart, but an incandescent tide spills forth. This world shakes and roars.
Farewell, beloved.
The first meteors blaze.
—Thank you for all you gave and all you were. I love you.
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PART ONE
KYRA
1
H
er chance was one in seven, unless the ghost lay at none of his old lairs. Then it would be zero, and finding him become a race against his enemies. Kyra more than half hoped that she, at least, would draw blank. Beyond Earth she dealt with vastness, vacuum, sometimes violence, but she had never been quarry. Por favor, let her simply and honestly report that Guthrie wasn’t here, and return to space.
Nerve stiffened. She had given troth.
Besides, if the task did fall on her, with any luck it shouldn’t prove dangerous. She’d merely be a rider on crowded public carriers. Nobody ought to suspect that she bore Fireball’s lord. If somehow the hunters learned she had visited Erie-Ontario Integrate, there were ready answers to whatever questions they might ask. The first several years of her life had passed in Toronto. How natural that she spend a short groundside leave taking a look at childhood scenes. Nor would she have to respond personally. By that time, supposing the occasion arose at all, she and Guthrie would be on the far side of the sky.
It tingled in her. She, his rescuer!
Maybe. Whatever happened, she’d better keep a cool head and a casual bearing. First concentrate on traffic. Scores of little three-wheeled cycles like hers wove and muttered their way among hundreds of pedestr
ians. On most the canopies were deployed, nearly invisible, shields against the weather. She had left her bubble folded, in an irrational wish to be free, today, of even such slight confinement. Nothing larger was allowed on this street, but vans threw their noise and shadows down off the monorail overhead. Now and then a flitter went whistling above them. No matter how hard the times, here the megalopolis churned.
Turbulence eddied from each of the bodies and bodies and bodies that hurried, dodged, dawdled, gestured, swerved, lingered. Colors and faces lost meaning in their swarm. The air was thick with their breath, harsh with their footfalls and voices. Wind drove clouds like smoke across the strips of sky between walls. It struck through Kyra’s hapi coat. Her blood welcomed the sharpness, which cut away part of the stench and claustrophobia.
Had this sector gone hellward in the past couple of decades, or was memory just softening itself? She wasn’t sure. Her parents had seldom brought her east of the lakes. Whatever the truth, she ought not to feel threatened. These were human beings, and better off than many. Yes, look, that dark woman in her sari, that caballero with bells on his wide-brimmed hat, that hombre whose brotherhood emblem and big scarred hands declared him a manual worker, that couple who by their green garments defiantly proclaimed themselves believers in the Renewal as their grandparents had been, what harm could they do? The menace was High World, the wielders of forefront technology, money, influence—more exactly, those of the High World who in this country were the government. It sprang from a mathematical theory.
Nevertheless grimy cliffs, murky doorways, guards in shops where the windows once held more and better goods, the crowd above all, took on a nightmarishness. Was she following an asymptote, struggling closer and closer to the Blue Theta but never quite to reach it?
Abruptly she did.
Gigantic though it was, the complex had been hidden from her by the surrounding masses. Nor could she now see it as a whole. A kilometer away and well aloft, vision would have swept up walls, piers, arches, roofs, towers, a-soar in azures and whites, to the Greek letter crowning the central spire. Here she made out only height and a broad gate standing open.
It was enough. Gladness leaped.
For a moment Kyra frowned. Why these mood swings? She’d been at risk before and stayed zen. Exhaustion? It hadn’t been a long drive from the tricycle rental to here. Of course, earlier she’d cabbed from Kamehameha to Honolulu, ridden the suborbital to Northwest Central, and changed maglevs twice on her way to Buffalo Station; but that was scarcely an ordeal.
Bueno, no doubt the knowledge of what was at stake had gnawed at her more than she knew. Silently reciting a peace mantra, she sought a place to park.
There. She stopped her motor, dismounted, wheeled the machine over to the rack, inserted a coin, and keyed the lock to her thumbprint. Fifty centos paid for an hour, which should be plenty. If not, she had cash to release it. Because rain appeared possible, she sprang the canopy loose. No sense in risking wet saddles, control board, and luggage box, when she might depart with such a cargo—and maybe a passenger—that discomfort would distract her attention from danger.
No time to gas off, either, though she’d better not make herself conspicuous by haste. She passed through the crowd and the gate into the court.
Tumult faded away. Again she felt naked. The area wasn’t deserted. People went to and fro, tenants, personnel, shoppers, visitors. Traffic seemed so sparse, though, so subdued. Maybe, Kyra thought, it was the contrast with the scene outside, not only thronged but alien—poor, primitive, powerless, the Low World that everywhere on Earth underlay the high technology yet had no real part in it.
Or maybe the magnificence here simply overwhelmed its occupants. Mosaic pavements surrounded fountains, gardens whose flowers and shrubs were the work of genetic artists, an outsize holo presenting a ballet recorded on a low-weight level of L-5. Against the curtain wall, ten stories of arcades lifted to a transparent roof. Sunbeams lanced past clouds. Beyond them stood the wan daylight Moon, like a homeland glimpsed in dream. Yes, she thought, right now the very Lunarians were in her mind more akin to her than these fellow citizens.
She bit her lip and strode on to the keep. The foyer at this entrance was almost empty. A maintainor rolled by on an errand, but a metal zodiac in the ceiling had gone dull for lack of polishing. Two men sat in loungers. One, sepia-hued, wore a drab coverall and smoked a cigarette. Kyra caught a whiff of cheap tobacco-marijuana blend and reflected with a moment’s wryness that however well or ill the Avantists had succeeded in controlling the ideas of North Americans, the vices had usually eluded them. The other man, robed, was totally hairless, his skin deep gold, his features . . . peculiar? A metamorph, his heritage left over from days when in certain jurisdictions on Earth experimentation with DNA was almost unfettered? They didn’t speak, probably they weren’t acquainted, nor did they watch the multiceiver. It showed a woman exhorting a youth group to learn and live by correct principles and report anyone who deviated to the authorities so they could enlighten that person.
Kyra shivered a bit. She had mostly dwelt apart from such things. Snatches came to her on newscasts, in written accounts, from the lips of witnesses. Sometimes they struck hard. (A child taken from his parents and they charged with abuse because they had repeatedly told him not to believe what he heard in school about Xuan’s great insights. An importer, who made her objections to various regulations conspicuous in foreign media, harassed to bankruptcy by the tax examiners and then convicted of tax evasion. A documentary on a rehabilitation center, the blank smiles of the inmates and the bland denial that they were there for political reasons: “This nation is in the process of transcending all politics.”) Always, though, she told herself that it was unfortunate but it couldn’t spread farther nor last much longer. Today she had seen, felt, smelled a piece of the reality.
At the directory board she keyboarded “Robert E. Lee” instead of speaking the name. Ridiculous; did she think yonder men were secret agents listening? Bueno, she wasn’t used to this game. The screen displayed “D-1567,” which she already knew, and directions for getting there. Her memory being excellent, she didn’t pay for a printout, but went straight to the fahrweg and signalled. The door retracted. She entered. Having no need of a cuddler to help her absorb the slight shock of acceleration, she stepped immediately from strip to strip until she was on the fastest.
The ride took a bad ten minutes, with three changes, including the vertical. To keep tension from ratcheting within her, she observed other folk as they got on or off or traveled along. They were less varied than what she had seen in cities elsewhere on Earth or on the streets here. Their garb ran to the same kinds of coat and trousers, tunics and tights, or unisuits, conservatively colored. Even fancy clothes, a man’s ruffled blouse, a woman’s iridon dress, had little of the flamboyant about them. Men were beardless and the haircuts of either sex seldom reached below the earlobes. For twenty-three years, now, among High Worlders and many Low Worlders of the North American Union, conformity had been a requirement of success. More and more, it was becoming a requirement of survival.
She noticed exceptions. Three boys flaunted scalplocks, feathers, and fringed garments. Several bearded men in headcloths accompanied women in veils and muffling ankle-length gowns. Also bearded were a pair of obvious Chasidim and a man displaying a pectoral cross whom she guessed was an Orthodox priest. That one talked with a burly fellow in blue, who wore a cap badged by a silver two-headed eagle and a truncheon at his belt. Most likely he was a constable of a tenants’ association. In a complex this size, whole blocks of units could be the sites of special communities, internally autonomous—not unlike Fireball, Kyra thought, except that in North America the present government tolerated their existence only reluctantly, because it wasn’t feasible to abolish them, and tried to keep a close eye on their doings.
Nevertheless it was a shock when another large man boarded. His outfit was tan, crisply form-fitting, a sidearm at the hip. An armband b
ore the infinity symbol of Avantism. Silence spread around him like waves when a stone falls into a pool. Officers of the Security Police seldom came here in uniform.
Did his glower single Kyra out? Her pulse quickened. Dryness prickled her tongue. What a stupid oversight it had been, hopping to the mainland in bright tropical jacket, shorts, sandals. Even in Hawaii, she remembered, such were frowned on nowadays. She’d paid little attention, for Earthside she mainly associated with company people on company property.
She braced herself. She wasn’t doing anything illegal, yet. Her identicard showed she was a citizen, nominally.
Scant comfort. A foreigner, arrested, would have more rights, more help to appeal for, than she would.
The Sepo got off. Kyra let out a breath. For an instant, she leaned on the cuddler beside her. Nonconformers looked at each other and, bit by bit, resumed their conversations.
The telltale flashed that she was approaching her destination. She crossed the strips, signalled jerkily, went through the door while it was still withdrawing, and caught the safety rail lest she stumble.
Anger flared. This was nonsense! She was a spacecraft pilot, able to handle herself at anything from zero g to ten. She wasn’t aged or sick, she was twenty-eight years old and her genome promised her another century or so of robust health if she heeded her medical program. All right, she was on a job new to her, possibly hazardous, but that was no excuse for blinkiness. Get on with it, girl.
Harvest of Stars - [Harvest of Stars 01] Page 1
