Having cleaned his gear, campsite, and self, he assembled his backpack, shrugged it on, and set forth. His plan was to continue along this ridge to Emerald Lake, then beside the stream that issued from it down into the valley and as far across as he could before dark. How far that would be depended on what he found on the way. Satellite views had indicated the route should offer a fair sample of conditions in general.
His pace was unforced but covered ground at a goodly rate among alder, birch, maple, spruce, berry bushes, hazel, among sun-spattered shadows and low soughings. Squirrels darted aloft, jays shrilled, a mockingbird fluted. The sun baked scents from leaves overhead and leaves that crinkled underfoot. His progress slowed after he reached the brook. The descent got steep, tricky in places, and brush grew thick. Besides, he stopped whenever he thought it advisable to examine a plant, take a specimen, or stick a chemical meter into the soil. These past five days he had searched the heights. Now he entered another environment, warmer, better sheltered, hard to observe from above and seldom traversed afoot. In such places nature might go agley unbeknownst till suddenly scathe exploded across a continent.
Thus far central Achaea seemed to be prospering. Hugh might have grinned and said aloud, “Nice job, Madre,” if discarnate Kyra might have seen or heard him. But that was improbable anywhere, out of the question here: no sensors, no integration of any kind except what the forest and its creatures brought forth of themselves. Robots lacked the minds to judge it. Therefore rangers were needed.
Hugh thought they would be till Phaethon smote. It wasn’t that the equipment couldn’t be produced; it could, at avalanche rates, even faster than engineered genes and molecular coactors drove the growth of nature. What set a limit was use. The download reported that year by year she gained mastery over her role. She proved it, taking on ever greater capabilities while Demeter suffered ever fewer sicknesses. Yet she would never consciously know or control any but a fraction of the whole. Did he think about each leg muscle when he walked, did he will his bloodstream to circulate oxygen and slay invaders, could he bind the sweet influences of love?
The stream rushed and rang, a final cascade, and whispered off through the valley, its glitter soon lost to sight behind trees. A kilometer onward he found a mossy ledge open to the sky and its breezes. Noontide waxed hot. Hugh crouched above the water, washed sweat off his face, sat down on the spongy greenness for a rest.
Brush barely rustled behind the clear space. He glanced about and sprang to his feet.
As softly as the girl had come, he knew her for loreful. She poised at the edge of the moss, nervous, ready to flee back into the shadows. Keeping hands well away from his sheath knife, he smiled his best smile. She was young, her slenderness not quite filled out, skin fair where the sun had not touched it with golden brown. Yellow hair fell from a garland of ivy past her shoulders. Her eyes were large and smoke blue, freckles dusted a snub nose, her lips recalled to him rose petals in his mother’s garden. For clothing she wore a sleeveless green tunic, less than knee-length, a pocketed belt, and moccasins. She carried a basket woven of split reeds.
“Why, hola,” he murmured.
“Who ... are you?” The English bore a slight accent, a lilt that he couldn’t put a name to.
“Ranger Hugh Davis, at your service, Señorita!”
Her mouth fluttered upward a bit. “I am . . . Charissa. How did you come, Ranger Hugh Davis?”
“Flew to Mount Mistfall and set out on foot.”
Her eyes widened. “Why?”
“I might ask you the same,” he countered. “You’re hardly outfitted for a long trek.”
“Oh, I live here. In Dandelion Glen, I call it, not far at all.” She hefted the basket. “I was berrying.”
“You live here?” he wondered. “Not by yourself, surely.”
She shook her head. The blonde locks tumbled. “No. My parents and two little brothers.” He guessed she too was trying for friendliness: “I’m glad to be free of the boys this while. They’re dears, but they can be such nuisances, can’t they?”
Wistfulness tugged. The first-born of Demeter, he had passed his childhood among adults, their machines, and some pet animals.
Bueno, he had his duty. “How long have you been in these parts?” he inquired. “Where did you come from?”
She frowned and touched her chin. “Nine years? No, eight, I think. I was little then myself.” She meant Demetrian years, of course; in those, he guessed she was now twelve or thirteen. “We moved from Aulis.” A settlement on the coast, he recollected, chiefly a marine research station though half a dozen families had joined it to experiment with agriculture under local conditions. “I don’t remember it very well.” Emboldened, she added, “But you aren’t telling me anything, Ranger Hugh Davis.”
“Uh, ‘Ranger’ is just my, uh, title,” he said, taken aback. “My work. I look to see how things are going in the wilds.”
Charissa nodded. “I know about rangers. We do have a multiceiver at home. Jason-Father lets us watch it an hour a day, or more if we’ve found something good.”
“He sounds pretty strict.” It wasn’t as if floods of programs were pouring out, the way he’d heard they did on Earth (or had done; he’d gotten an impression it wasn’t true any longer). Port Fireball’s live broadcasts were intermittent, amateur, and decorous. For most entertainment, people drew on the cultural database, when they didn’t make their own.
“We can screen as many books as we like,” Charissa said. “I read a lot. Yes, I know about rangers. But I don’t know how to ad—ad—address you, sir.”
“ ‘Hugh’ is fine, Charissa.”
Her shyness left her. “Can you stop and visit us? Betty-Mother will be so happy.”
“M-m, what about your father?”
She laughed. “Don’t you fear. He may be kind of stiff at first, but he’ll soon break out the cider and talk. Oh, my, he’ll talk!”
“You get visitors, I take it?”
“A few. Mostly woodsrunners.”
“Woodsrunners?”
“You know. They don’t live in houses—they make shelters wherever they roam—” The girl stopped, surprised. “You don’t know?”
His scalp prickled. “N-no. They can’t have been at it long, or be many. Else we’d have heard.”
“I suppose. I haven’t counted them.”
Hugh sensed how his tension troubled her, and sought for an easing. “You and your folks, you live in a house, right?”
“It isn’t a big house,” Charissa admitted. “I’ve seen houses on the multi. This is a, a cabin. But it’s snug.”
He couldn’t escape bluntness. “Why do you do it?”
“Why—why— We’re happy.” She took a defensive stance. “Jason-Father says it’s too cramped and mechanical everywhere else that people are.”
“But he hasn’t made woodsrunners of his family.”
“Certainly not!” She sounded indignant. “Can’t you see?”
Taking that for an invitation, he gave himself the pleasure of studying her in detail. Her tunic was natural fiber and dyes, well-woven, well-tailored; similarly for her pocket belt, and its buckle was annealed neopine resin. Her entire being spoke of good nutrition, adequate medical and dental protection, freedom from toil such as bent the body and stunted the soul.
Though it appeared that a handful of eccentrics had adopted a pseudo-savage life, Jason-Father and Betty-Mother weren’t among them. A multi and a power source were obviously not the only things they had taken along when they retreated into the wilderness. And ... it wasn’t a piece of primeval Earth revived. Those ancient forests had provided food, fuel, timber, fiber, skins, furs, bone, horn, remedies, an abundance never intended but discovered. On Demeter lived species meant to be viable, fully in the natural world, but also serving human needs. Nicknames drifted through Hugh’s thoughts: mulch bacteria, copper algae, fleshfruit, woolbark, healer mold. ... If these had taken a strong hold in the Achaean outback, then, given perhaps a
tool kit, a polyrobot, and a basic nanoarray— Yes, it would be most interesting to see what they had wrought at Dandelion Glen.
Charissa flushed beneath Hugh’s regard, though she didn’t seem to mind very much. “We trade things we make, for what they hunt and gather,” she explained earnestly. “But we are—are—settlers.”
“This will be priority news at headquarters,” he said. “It upsets everything for us.”
He hadn’t expected instant alarm. Had she picked up cues of hostility to authority from her parents? Why? They had done nothing illegal. It would have been better if they’d given notice of their intent to seek the forest—and quite likely they hadn’t because they knew the biological service would discourage them from it—but still— Maybe hers was simply a nymph’s timidity when for the first time she met a warrior in bronze, with plumed helmet and sword at side.
“You see—” Hugh stumbled, “the reason I’m here—” He dropped into lecture mode, hoping that would soothe her. “This isn’t a climax forest, you realize. It’s new, and changing fast. The genes were designed for quick maturation, the warmth and carbon dioxide level make it possible, but at this stage the ecology isn’t stable. We aim for an eventual steady state, trees that last for centuries, a million different plants and animals—”
“I know,” Charissa interrupted, a bit impatiently.
That struck him as a promising sign. “Bueno, we’ve reached a point in Achaea where we’re thinking of introducing bigger game. Deer, for instance. That means making sure they won’t graze their range to death, which means bringing in wolves to control them, and, and . . . endless complications. I’m running survey to help find out whether the country is ready for this, whether it can take it without harm.”
Rapture burst from her. “Deer? Wolves?” She dropped the basket and clapped her small hands together. “Eagles?”
He raised a palm. “Por favor, listen. The presence of humans, resident in the woods, using them, even if you’re only a scattering, this changes the situation completely. We can’t go ahead as we’ve planned while you’re here.”
She shrank back, abruptly terrified. “You’d send us away?” she gasped. “You won’t!” she screamed. “Guthrie-Chief won’t let you!”
Dismayed in his turn, he exclaimed back, “Of course he wouldn’t!” A part of him thought how the irreverent, libertarian old bastard had become a god of sorts, fountainhead of law and justice. “Have no fears, Charissa. Honestly. All this means is that we need to reconsider. We may slow down, we may go faster, I don’t know, but—but we’ll hear what your father and mother and you have to say, we’ll work out what’s best for everybody.”
With childlike volatility, she calmed. “Th-thank you, . . . Hugh.” She brushed knuckles across tears, straightened, and agreed reverently, “We’ll find what’s best for Demeter.”
Gladness welled in him. “You understand.”
“We do. My folk.”
“I think,” he said low, “I may have met the future today.”
Merriment sprang up. “Oh, don’t be so solemn.” She danced over the moss to seize his arm. “Come along home, do!”
* * * *
57
That the biosphere would expand beyond the control capabilities of a humanlike mind was predictable from the first. We can supply you with the specifications of and instructions for a sophotect to which the problems involved are trivial.
* * * *
O
n a hilltop in North Argolis stood three cypresses. Rapidly growing, they had been bent and gnarled by the winds until they bore an aspect of immemorial antiquity. Eiko thought this no illusion but truth. What was time other than the succession of events? A hundred years of memory could pass in an eyeblink and a world doomed to death contain eternity.
She set her flitter down near the bottom and got stiffly out. Except for small groves and single trees, well apart—live oak, pine, crabapple—the landscape rolled grassy, silver-green a-ripple kilometer after kilometer, rising westward to mountains whose peaks made a low crown along that horizon, falling eastward to a remote gleam of ocean. Light spilled from above; a few clouds floated blue-shadowed white in an immensity through which the sun A strode noonward. Thence also drifted the delirious piping of a lark. A breeze cooled her brow. It carried scents of wild thyme.
Once easy, the climb uphill soon shot pains through her hip joints. She leaned hard on her staff and often stopped to catch breath. Well, when at rest she enjoyed views that widened as she mounted.
No complaints. Earth had rounded Sol well over a hundred times since she came to birth, she neared the bounds of what cellular medicine could do, but she kept her senses, most of her wits, and strength for at least one last ascent. It was enough, overflowingly enough.
Still, she felt glad to reach the top and lower herself carefully onto the duff that covered it, in the dappled shade of the cypresses. Their boughs crooked bunches of tourmaline needles against sky and distance. The cover they had dropped was soft, warm to the touch, sweet-smelling, though that was overborne by the rosemary clustered nearby. Bees hummed golden about those tiny flowers, which were the color of heaven just above yonder gorge. Down its granite went the white arrowshaft of a waterfall.
Her heart slowed. Behind her hulked a lichenous gray boulder. She had often sat long times watching light and shadow weave across it, drawing serenity from the mass and unplanned shapeliness. Today, though, she leaned back and let it give her some of what it had drunk from the sun.
Peace descended.
It never quite had for Nero, she recalled. He came with her now and then to be polite, to be kind, and no doubt he liked the vistas, but there was too much stallion in him.
Peace. Regret became one with the air. She had never tried to curb his heart. And so at last the flooding Scamander took him, and his bones lay somewhere under the cliffs of Troas, but what better ending could he have desired? How long ago it was, and their years together like a dream ... yet that day in the meadow at— Where? She had lost the place name. No matter. He reached high to pluck a spray of orange blossoms and gave it to her in exchange for a kiss, why, that happened only now, his laugh had hardly finished—
“Eiko.”
She started out of her drowse and blinked from right to left. A small wind ruffled the rosemary. A raven had settled on a branch. He sheened black as a midnight sea.
“Eiko, Eiko,” called the low voice.
She came fully awake and sat straight. The duff crackled beneath her thin haunches. “Who is this?” she asked, unafraid but uncertain. “Where are you?”
“Just me, Eiko. Kyra.”
“Oh—” They had met like this before, though never here. Hidden in the shrubbery must be a robug or some other little device that could speak. But it was no more than an instrument for the download. “I didn’t know you had—”
—grown the sensory network this far. That was no slight undertaking. Did Kyra see with electronic eyes or the eyes of that raven, did she hear with electronic ears or the vibrant wings of those bees?
The reply faltered. “I. . . held back till lately. This hill is yours.”
“No, of course it isn’t. I am fond of it, yes, but—”
“I think I can tell what’s holy, clearer than when I was alive.”
Eiko’s vision stung and blurred. “You would always have been welcome!”
“Finally I dared hope so,” Kyra said. “And I thought we might best talk of. . . certain things . . . here.”
Eiko swallowed. “Then it is well you decided. I may never come back.”
“A hard climb, at your age.”
“And I will not come any other way. That would be wrong.”
“Holiness.”
Eiko’s mind leaped to what the windlike whisper said before. “You are not dead, Kyra, not a machine thing!”
Laughter clucked low. “Don’t scoff at my kinfolk. They brought us to Demeter, they made all of this be.”
Eiko shook her whit
e head. “No. We did, using them.”
“Myself, I’ve loved various machines. My darling Kestrel—” The voice went down into silence.
Eiko wondered if Kyra was trying to console her, who didn’t need it. “You aren’t one, whatever they say,” she declared under heaven. “You are alive. More alive than . . . than I am now. Than I perhaps ever was.”
“That is why I am with you today.”
Bewilderment: “What, to say farewell? No, no, I have several more years in me, surely.” They ought to be gentle.
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