Harvest of Stars - [Harvest of Stars 01]

by Poul Anderson

  Mural screens down the corridor showed men at war, Assyrians, Hebrews, Romans, vikings, Moors, knights, samurai, Aztecs . . . until at last a Chinese crossed bayonets with a Pathan of the Grand Jihad. They were animations, vivid but too stylized for sadism. The clientele here couldn’t really be gyrocephs. The price of admission proved they were well-to-do, therefore well educated, therefore treated early on for any pathologies. Then why did they come? If they craved excitement, surely they could afford a quivira.

  She reached a transverse corridor. Escalators went up in three directions. She chose the left at random. On the floor above, a hall curved off, one wall transparent. She went for a look. Beyond was a room where a man, maybe a referee, watched two others who were scarcely more than boys. Clad in tights, they fought with quarterstaffs, blow and parry. Blood mingled with the sweat agleam on their bruised torsos. Those sticks could fracture skulls.

  In the next room stood a framework like an inverted L. It was a gallows. Also watched by another, a naked man sprattled a meter off the floor, hanged by the neck. Kyra gasped.

  “The doc is supposed to lower him in time,” said a voice.

  The speaker was lithe, handsome in afro fashion, attired in trunks. Evidently he was on his way somewhere, had seen her appalled, and stopped to proffer an amiable smile. “Why?” she faltered.

  He shrugged. “Not my pasatiempo. But I’m told the sensations are special. Plus the danger, of course.” His regard was frankly inquisitive. “We seldom get women here. Are you after anything particular? Maybe I can help.”

  “N-no.” Kyra clenched her fists. The hanged man’s tongue was out of his mouth. “I, I’m simply curious.” A yell: “Let him down!”

  “You could have had a pleasanter introduction,” her companion admitted. He scowled. “Crack, it is going on long, isn’t it? Let’s boost. If he does die, I don’t care to watch. He might not be revivable.”

  Shivering, she matched his stride. “Where are you bound?” she whispered, dry-throated.

  He smiled again. “Now that’s something you should enjoy seeing. A new attraction. Twelve-meter waterfall into a basin with stakes below the surface. I’ll go down it wearing a gillpiece. They change the positions of the stakes every day. Grandissimo.”

  “Ghastly, I’d call it.”

  He sounded genuinely puzzled. “What? It’s a clean sport. Not like the shark tank. Oh, I wouldn’t want you trying it. I wonder if you should have come at all.”

  “Maybe not.” Impulsively, she added, “I’ve been in danger myself, more than once. It goes with my job. But this is—is—why do you do it?”

  They went by a room that seemed empty except for an observer staring aloft. Something in Kyra compelled her to look. The space was three stories high. Under the ceiling stretched a wire. A man was making his way across. No net was beneath him.

  Bitterness astonished her: “What else is there, if you’ve got blood in your veins?”

  It was in the nature of the young human male to risk his neck, she thought dizzily. Wasn’t it? Or did this that she saw arise from some rebellion of the spirit against—against what?

  Her escort calmed. “Besides, my chances are excellent,” he said. “I’m not suicidal. This is just a way to be fully alive. Afterward I relax.” He turned oddly shy. “Uh, my name’s Sam, Samuel Jackson. I’m a junior scientist in protein design. If you care to watch me shoot the fall, I’d be delighted to invite you for dinner. We could talk some more.”

  Temptation tugged. He was attractive, and his mystique had the lure of being almost comprehensible. No. Lee, Guthrie, Fireball. “Gracias, I’m sorry, but I can’t. Enjoy yourself. Luck be with you.” Another hall branched off. She hurried down it.

  In an alcove she found seats, took one, and read the pamphlet. It included maps. They showed three exits, well apart. Leggatt would scarcely set his bandidos to watch so many. She could leave.

  Somehow that didn’t feel quite like a liberation. Was the Wilderness actually evil? It catered to the animal in man, but it didn’t force you in, nor did it try to remold you. Outside were the Avantists, their prisons and re-education clinics, censorship and exhortation, controlled schools and controlled economy, all with the aim of raising humankind above the animal.

  Not too successful, were they? But the effort had killed a lot of people. It could still give her death or worse.

  Tensely she stepped forth into daylight, mingled with the meaningless swarm, and concentrated on putting distance between herself and the ruin.

  A booth caught her glance. YOUR FUTURE stood above it. A voice intoned: “—psychic projection forward along your world line, through the space-time continuum—” She forgot it. Hard by, another booth advertised FOOD.

  It was a decent little spot, where a woman cooked her two burritos and tapped her a mug of beer, beer! The cold catnip of it gushed over Kyra’s palate and down her throat. For dessert she got directions to Mama Lakshmi’s Tea House.

  That was a two-story, metal-sided building, undistinguished except for a verandah within which a wall-size screen presented an animation of the loves of Krishna. The lobby gave on a bar and restaurant to the right, a gaming parlor to the left. Nobody was about, aside from a dark woman at a desk. Kyra approached. “I’d like a room,” she said.

  “Ten dollars an hour,” replied the clerk. “No professionals.”

  Kyra’s face heated. “I want it for—overnight.”

  “Ten dollars an hour till twenty-one hundred. Then overnight rate, one hundred dollars. Checkout time nine.”

  Heartened by a full belly, Kyra said, “Too much. One hundred flat, counting from now.”

  “Done,” said the clerk instantly.

  She’d better learn how to bargain, Kyra thought as she paid. Her reserves could dwindle fast. “I’m expecting a visitor,” she said. “My name is Emma Bovary. B, O, V, A, R, Y.”

  The clerk made a note on her computer. “Who is the visitor?”

  “Do you need to know?”

  “For your safety. This is a secure house.”

  Kyra scanned her memory. “Uh, John Smith.” The clerk snickered but entered it and gave her a key.

  The room was upstairs, shabbily furnished though reasonably clean, with a bath cubicle and a barebones multi. Its walls muffled the noise outside to a minimum. Kyra considered tuning in the news. No, first she could use some rest. Take off her pack, kick off her shoes, flop onto the bed—

  She was in space, in the Taurid Stream. Strange that that centuried menace was unseeable except as radar blips. Her eyes found only stars wintry bright in a crystal dark. Light within the cabin overrode all save a few hundred. Acceleration ended, she floated free, ghost-alone. Then a sight waxed slowly before her, a flicker of shadows and vague luminance as the comet turned, wobbled, orbited toward distant Earth. It was ice and rock and dust, three hundred million primordial tonnes. If it struck, it was death, wreck, and a year without a summer. It was too friable to deflect; the necessary force would crack it apart and the unmanageable fragments would be nearly as deadly. Instead it must be destroyed, and soon, turned into pieces scattered enough and small enough that when they reached the planet they would do no harm. But nuclear blasts of that magnitude would fill ambient space with the shrapnel, and she, the data-gathering scout, might be on an escape course that proved unlucky—

  A knock roused her. She sat up with a gasp. Sunbeams slanted low through the window. Jesus on a jet, had she slept so long? The knock repeated. She surged to unlock the door.

  Lee came in, wearing Western male clothes. He carried the pack that held Guthrie on his back and a small bag in his left hand. She noticed that his informant was missing from that wrist. Her look sought his countenance. It was drawn into harsh lines, though he managed a smile of sorts. “Hi,” he said. Strain flattened the voice.

  “Bienvenido,” Kyra answered uncertainly. “It took you a while, didn’t it? Trouble?”

  “Nothing serious.” Lee closed the door. “I had to search
around longer than I’d expected before I found what I was after.”

  “Get me out of this poke and explain what the hell it was,” Guthrie growled.

  Lee removed him and put him on the dresser. “They wouldn’t let me past the entryroom at that place,” the man related. “I had to dicker over an intercom. It’s a new location. They’ve grown ultra-cautious.”

  “I thought anything went in Quark Fair,” Kyra said.

  “Not quite. If the Sepo got wind that this stuff is being dealt—” Lee slumped into a chair and stared before him.

  “At a suitable price,” Guthrie remarked. “I heard how you ended up swapping your expensive tipster for whatever it was.”

  “Worth it, sir. I never made that kind of purchase before, but I’d heard it could be done, and where.”

  “What are you talking about?” Kyra asked.

  “Give me a chance to unwind first,” Lee sighed. “It isn’t a pretty subject.”

  “I’ll go downstairs and fetch something to drink. What would you like?”

  Lee shook his head. “What I’d love beyond measure is a stiff bourbon and branch, but no alcohol for me today.”

  “Serve yourself if you want, Kyra,” Guthrie said.

  “No, not really,” she answered. “Unless coffee—” No. As was, her nerves thrummed. She began to pace between the walls. “I had a few problems myself.” She described her journey.

  Lee whistled. “For a lady who’s led a sheltered life, you done right well, ma’m.”

  “Yeah, let’s get you back to your nice, cozy solar flares, radiation belts, meteoroid collisions, and moonquakes as fast as possible,” Guthrie laughed. His tone went metallic. “Or faster. We’ve got damned little time, if any.”

  Chill crawled through Kyra. “Are things that bad, sir? Why?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Obvious as a wart on a nudist’s ass. My other self. He won’t be slow to figure I’m on the loose, and move to counter whatever I might do. If he can swing that, Fireball is his. Is the enemy’s, the Advisory Synod’s. In which case, let’s hope we three are comfortably dead. We wouldn’t appreciate the future.”

  Lee grimaced. “How horrible is this situation for him, do you think?”

  The cold deepened in Kyra. She couldn’t guess an answer to that question; her knowledge of psychonetics was scant. Perhaps Guthrie had no clear idea either. But pseudo-Guthrie—

  Wrong. The other was Guthrie too. That might as well have been the physical object that stayed behind, ruling over Fireball, and this that now spoke with her might as well have been the one that fared four and a third light-years and back again. It wouldn’t have mattered. Shared after the return, their memories were identical. Only in the happenings that followed did those histories break asunder.

  Irrationally, she wished the mass she had borne in her hands were the mass that had traveled. It should not lie enslaved—he should not, who had walked beneath the heaven of Demeter.

  * * * *

  6

  Database

  T

  oward evening the rainstorm that had lashed the day reached an end. Wind continued strongly for a while, scattering clouds until they were few. So clear a sky was a rare sight. At this time of this year the suns were close together in it. Guthrie left camp, which was too well sheltered by a ridge to have a view, and went to watch them set.

  On his way to the seashore he encountered a biologist. Fifteen centimeters in length, it seemed weirdly like a giant insect, more alive than the greenish-brown mat of plant stuff its tendrils probed. For an instant, as a sensor caught Guthrie’s image, the work paused. He knew that a transmission flashed to a receiver balloon-borne over the station and thence, amplified, to the mainframe computer on the ground. His own radio ear wasn’t sensitive enough to hear, if he had been in the path of the beam. No matter. The computer identified him within a microsecond and sent the command Ignore. The biologist got busy again.

  Elsewhere others, more or less like it according to their specialties, were also engaged, but Guthrie didn’t see them. The land reached empty from western hills to eastern sea. It was boulders and rocky outcrops, blues and grays with quartz glitters, rising behind tawny dunes. Here and there a pool or a puddle caught the long light and turned into gold, which the wind shivered. The storm had carried sultriness away. Air whistled off the ocean laden with salt spray, an ozone tang, pungencies that were not really of kelp and fish.

  He left the robug, as he called it, behind and proceeded to the strand. The body he was using ran on treads. He felt their serpentine ripple over the terrain, the fine grit yielding to his weight, the damp within that soil. Beneath wind and surf he heard his passage, crunch, slither, a whirr of motors. His other body had legs but was more complex and vulnerable. This one actually brought him nearer to communion with the world around him, closer to being human again. Memories stirred that had slept for many years.

  The tide was low. Rain had not much marked the sand, but in front of the gentle breakers it had been drenched and darkened by the sea. On Earth that strip would have been wider.Hush-hush-hush went the waves under the wind.

  Guthrie’s eyes, their stalks projecting from the turret that housed his case, bent downward. The beach was strewn with weed, shells, dead animals vaguely like worms and jellyfish. An ebb always left some, and the storm had cast up many. Their wreckage brought to mind what he had seen on the shores of home, before Earth grew too depleted. Strange that here life in the oceans had long been rich, when thus far it barely existed on land. Or maybe not strange. Tides might well be what opened the way for evolution ashore, and moonless Demeter had only its sun to drive them.

  A gleam afar caught his glance. Curious, he peered across the waves. They still ran high, white-capped, purpled by the glow from the west, to a blurred horizon. Never a gull or a guillemot winged above them. Guthrie magnified the sight his lenses captured. A torpedo shape had surfaced a hundred meters out, mother vessel of robugs studying the aquatic environment and its ecology. He wondered whether it had worked its way this far north from the last base the expedition established, or was newly made. Remodeled production facilities were now operating at full capacity, and aircraft flitted investigators to sites around the globe. He could ask the database.

  Later. He’d come to watch Alpha Centauri go down. He turned westward.

  Beyond the dunes, hills lifted murky, their erosion scars full of shadow. Clouds lay in bands, rose and honey against luminous blue. Haze dimmed the brilliance of A to a hot coal. Sinking, the disc seemed enormous, though it was a little smaller than Sol’s seen from Earth. B followed a few degrees behind, a refulgent point that tinged the tops of the clouds with amber.

  The rotation period of Demeter was a mere fifteen hours. A vanished in a gulp. As its light drained away and the sky deepened, B’s became clear to sight, yellow, strong as a thousand full Lunas. Heights and crests stood soft above the dusk that rose from below. Then the companion sun, descending, dimmed likewise, reddened, and plunged. The last colors faded and stars came forth one by one to blink at those already in the east.

  Among them appeared a moving spark. It climbed fast, widdershins, in low orbit around the planet—theJuliana Guthrie, which had brought him here and waited to carry him home. No, he knew, that wasn’t quite right. What he saw was the tanks of the clustered drive units. The spacecraft itself was too small for his eyes, even if he magnified: with payload, a few tonnes. On remote comets and on asteroids of the chaotic zone, robots toiled to mine raw materials and refine them into reaction mass for the next voyage. It would take them several years.

  Memory overleaped space-time.

  * * * *

  An office in Port Bowen. Transparency overhead full of a night where Earth stood glorious, marbled blue and white, three quarters full. Pierre Aulard’s honest hook-nosed face across the desk behind which Guthrie rested. An explosive “Qu’est-ce que vous dites? ‘Ave you blown a fuse?”

  “Some folks might reckon that question a sm
idgen tactless.”

  “I—yes, I am sorry, sir.”

  “Oh, come off it. I was kidding.”

  “Sis you say, it is a joke?”

  “No. I wouldn’t make my favorite engineer arrive in person just to see his eyes pop. Contrariwise, I did it because I’m so serious that I want to catch your total reaction, body language, the works. The best hologram a phone can produce isn’t the same.”

  “But it is fou, loco, gyroceph. I do not understand w’y you want any second mission at all. Se robots in place—”

  “Inadequate. We need more and better. God damn it, Pierre, Demeter’s the single piece of real estate besides what’s sitting yonder where there’s life we can study.”

  “Not so. Planets wis oxygen atmospheres ‘ave been detected at sree osser—”