Unthinkingly, Kyra nodded and smiled. She remembered.
“It has been for a long time, I imagine,” Valencia remarked.
Guthrie had related the history to him when he inquired: “After the Renewal fell, we decided Fireball could use an American base, and Hawaii seemed best. It’d cost more to demolish the old, abandoned facilities and rebuild than to start from scratch. The economy was in such desperate shape, and ‘ecology’ wasn’t the knee-jerk shibboleth it had been, that the new government was glad to sell us a little piece of Volcanoes Park. Especially since we undertook to restore and replant as needed, everywhere in the park. The Goddess Temple had let it go to hell. Controlling things like blight and animal populations was a religious no-no. We did build on the shore, out of lava reach, but we also contributed to general maintenance on a permanent basis. The arrangement’s worked fine.
“Then, about thirty years ago, the Chinese terminated their intelligence-genetics project. You probably aren’t aware, at this late date, what a mistake it had been. They didn’t learn anything about the role of DNA in brain processes that hadn’t been learned in easier ways, without creating hapless metamorphs. And now the Federation had legislated that neosophs have the same rights as human beings. What to do with these? I thought Fireball could provide them a home. Among other advantages, we could block off the gaping tourists, yawping ideologists, and quick-money hustlers. It took propaganda, political pressure, dickering, bribery, and a spot of blackmail, but I got the franchise. They have a secluded bit of coast to themselves. A patrol boat keeps unwanted visitors well off shore. They live as they see fit and are developing a culture of their own. No human I’ve talked to claims to really understand it.”
“Bueno,” Valencia continued, “I’m happy we don’t have to sneak through the jungle, but I won’t open the fence where any passerby might notice.” He hefted his tool bag and disappeared soundlessly into the growth. After a minute, spots of light from his flash and the hum of his power cutter passed among the leaves to Kyra.
They thrilled through her. The fleeing was at an end, the foray begun! It felt like hurtling forward on a surfboard, but this wave roared as high as the stars. A mosquito in her mind shrilled that failure would be nauseating, quite probably fatal. She didn’t listen. The tide ran too strong.
Guthrie’s lenses glinted upward at her. “I think you look forward to the next several hours,” he said.
Kyra nodded. “I confess I do. And you?”
“In my fashion. Which you’d find pretty cold and abstract, maybe sort of the way you’d approach an interesting problem in mathematics.”
Of course. He was bodiless. And yet he seemed capable of concern, anger, merriment, regret, affection. Was it all an act? Or could such feelings dwell in the awareness itself? She thought so. If not, why had Guthrie bothered to survive, let alone strive and fight? Kyra recalled old married couples she had known. Sex for them had dwindled to ember or ash, she supposed; nonetheless she had seen that she was in the presence of love.
“I envy you,” he said low.
Astonished, she almost dropped him. Valencia saved them from further talk by reappearing. “Come,” he said. Kyra put Guthrie into the carryall, it onto her shoulders, and followed. Valencia’s flash lit their way through the tangle and she moved easily, parting it before her, letting it slip smoothly back behind her. “I see you’ve done this before,” he remarked.
“Yes, I like wilderness. You?”
“Likewise. If you can call those managed snippets wilderness. Here we are.”
He had parted the links and pulled them back just enough for a person to squeeze past. The ground beyond, though open, was trickier going, irregularly canted, strewn with boulders and potholes that the long grass hid. Peering, sweating, swearing, Kyra picked her way to the footpath that led from the locked gate. Valencia moved with his usual panther ease. Damn him.
They reached the sea and its children.
Fireball had enlarged a cove, using the rock blasted out to make a breakwater at its mouth. Sheer bluffs flanked a beach of black sand. On a nearly level plot above it, a hemicylindrical shed protected the dwellers’ meager belongings. With magnetic latches, its doors opened to a push; jaws grasping knobs could pull them shut. A motor raft and a powerboat lay at a pier for human convenience. No other artifacts were visible. It was too dark to see the art that the Keiki Moana had splashed in paint along the bottoms of the bluffs or gnawed out of soft wood.
They slept, stretched on the sand and the turf. Kyra saw perhaps two score of them, long, sleek adults and stubby pups. What light there was sheened faint on the fur of their backs; otherwise they were sable hulks. The rest, she supposed, were at sea, hunting, exploring, whatever they did, maybe some of them on a reef coughing their strange songs at the sky. As she drew nigh these she caught the odor that drifted about them, of fish and kelp and depth and, like a memory, sun-blink on waves.
She stopped, Valencia beside her. “Aloha, makamaka,” she called, no louder than the surge against the breakwater. “Aloha ahiahi. O Kyra Davis ko’u inoa.”
They stirred. Heads lifted. Eyes filled with starlight.
“I didn’t know you spoke Hawaiian,” Valencia murmured.
“I don’t, really,” Kyra answered. “Nor do they much, I think. But it’s … customary to begin and end in that language … with them. I don’t know why.” So much had come to be, no doubt often so subtly that no one could say how. Two races, the inmost heart of each a mystery to the other—though Earth had borne them both. What then would it be like, seeking to understand beings under a different sun?
If any existed, anywhere in the universe. If neosophonts and machines were not the only companions humanity could ever have. Abruptly the stars felt cold. Kyra welcomed the approach of the Keiki.
They hitched themselves along more readily than you might have awaited. A few barked a time or two, otherwise she heard just flippers a-slap and bellies a-slither. When the foremost reached her, they all stopped wherever they chanced to be, heads up, odorous breath soughing in and out of lungs.
Kyra recognized Charlie. So she and her friends called him, again for no reason clear to her. He was bigger than average. Reared aloft, his face came even with her breasts, and the bulk curving away beneath was at least equal to Valencia’s. She could see the scar of an accident, a seam down the domed forehead and across the sea-cleaving snout. A human surgeon had stitched the wound, but cosmetic histotropy afterward had appeared impractical in his case. Besides, Charlie wasn’t vain. Was he?
His voice boomed and sibilated at her. “A’oha, Ky’a. Hiaow kong fsh-sh s’s’hwi-oong?”
She had read that the modified vocal organs could handle Mandarin a little better than that. It was plausible, seeing as how these beings were the result of Chinese experiments. Maybe they could handle Polynesian no more awkwardly, but even in this new home of theirs they had scant occasion to practice it. What mattered tonight was that the modified brains could cope well with English. Her share had been to learn her own language as it sounded from throats like his.
“Gracias, Charlie and everyone,” she said. “Meet my amigo Nero Valencia.” She repeated the name twice, slowly. The gunjin bowed in the manner she had told him he should, bringing his head down to Charlie’s till the stiff whiskers brushed his nose. “We are sorry to disturb your sleep.”
“[This pleasure is better than dreams. Do you want to swim? The Moon will rise in a while.]”
“Yes, we are here to swim, but right away, before the Moon comes. Forgive us that we bring no music or food and that we shan’t dance in the water with you. Later, yes, but tonight we have great need and no time.”
“[Do you chase a prey?]”
“A shark, that we have to kill before it kills us.”
It was the best she and Guthrie had been able to devise. She could but hope that it conveyed a sense of mortal urgency, and that the Keiki would believe and help her. Explaining the facts would have been an exercise i
n mutual incomprehension.
It wasn’t that these creatures were isolated from the world. They had multiceivers in their shed and a robot responsive to simple commands. They discoursed at length with the scientists who came here by Fireball’s permission. Several of them had been taken on tours. It was that they knew the world not as humans did, but—fundamentally, in spite of everything that had been done to the germ plasm of their ancestors—as seals did.
(Forget about dolphins. They are clever animals, but too alien. Most of those big forebrains are for processing sensory data that come in on the scanty bandwidth of sound. Use apes instead—and find that they are not alien enough, that you have discovered very little in the course of producing grossly handicapped hominids. It should be less cruel and more enlightening to experiment with pinnipeds. … And what have you at the end but an animal with a mind and no hands, a swimmer less able than its forefathers, thus forced to ways of life unknown throughout its evolution, worse at war with its ancestral urges than you are with yours?)
For the same reason, Kyra did not produce Guthrie from her pack. They knew him, but only slightly and in a robot body.
“[Where would you go? What would you do?]”
“We must put well out to sea in the boat. Some of you come along. When we’re opposite the spaceport, we’ll leave the boat and swim ashore. You’ll have to help us, and it has to be quietly, quietly. It’s a terrible shark we hunt.” On land, but she had no better word. The Keiki knew nothing about vipers or governments. “That’s all. It has to be done fast, though. We beg you. Por favor. ’Olu’olu.”
The Keiki exchanged looks. One by one they started to bark, till it rang between the bluffs. “[A new game!]” Charlie bayed. “[Come, come!]” He swung about and wriggled beachward. The whole pack did, a crowding, shoving, ululating chaos.
“They’ll do it?” Valencia asked eagerly. “That was quick.”
“I expected they’d agree,” Kyra answered. “They’re always happy for something new. Like … children.” Her voice dropped. “Or like us, I suppose, if we were pensioners on a lonely shore.”
Like many humans already. Like humans everywhere after they had become pensioners of their machines, she thought.
It took a quarrelsome while at the water’s edge to settle who should have the delight of going. Kyra must insist repeatedly that the party be minimal. Charlie grabbed two successive obstreperous individuals, teeth clamped on neck, and shook them into submission. He seemed to be the alpha male—no, Kyra recalled, that wasn’t right. Dominance order, breeding pattern, migration, everything had changed as much as the life of her genus had changed since Australopithecus. Or more, because her line had evolved through a geological era, not been thrown into sapience in the course of two or three generations. What was arising to replace the ancient ways of the seals?
When at length she could start the boat, she must keep its engine throttled back lest she outrun her escort. They traveled fast, though, silvery torpedoes vaguely seen through foam and streaming water, now and then an exultant leap or a toboggan run down a wave. The patrol craft spied theirs, drew near, saw that they were outbound, and veered off, its robotic pilot finding no reason to summon a police flitter.
“Lemme out of here,” Guthrie demanded on her back. She gave Valencia the wheel and obeyed, setting him on deck behind the cockpit. His eyestalks roved. Did he too devour the sight, knowing it could be his last?
The boat purred smoothly over low swells. Forward they heaved, a burnished blackness, to the edge of heaven. A ship was passing yonder, brightly lighted, toylike at its distance. Somehow it deepened Kyra’s sense of isolation. Aft the land gloomed lofty. Kamehameha was a star cluster on it, outshining the wan points overhead. Wind and sea lulled. Kyra lost herself in the night.
“I think we’re far enough out,” Valencia said. He brought them parallel to shore. His hair mingled with the mountainous dark, his profile stood sculptured against it. Kyra laid a hand on his thigh.
Not that she’d fallen in love or anything, no, no, but she mightily wished they’d had time of their own this afternoon, and when she came back after victory—
She gasped. The horizon ahead was lightening. “Moon-rise already?” she exclaimed. “Have we taken this long?”
Valencia glanced at his informant. “Yes,” he replied as if she had asked him for the time or the square root of a number. “Bueno, we can try to make it an advantage, not an extra danger. When we arrive, keep low in the water, go onto the beach on all fours, lie prone till I signal you.”
“You’ll go ahead alone? No!”
“He’s the pro, Kyra,” Guthrie reminded her. “You wouldn’t let him at the console of a spaceship, would you?”
“Right.” Valencia turned his head to meet her eyes. His smile flashed like a wave crest. “We’ll proceed together, never fear.”
She tautened. “We will.”
Kamehameha blazed ahead. He cut the engine. The boat whispered to a stop and rocked in the swing of the sea. Kyra forgot her fears. In and at them!
Standing up in the cockpit, she and Valencia took off their clothes. The Moon entered the sky. That low, it did not yet cast a glade. A million tiny wires of light quivered on the water. The Keiki turned luminous. For an instant, man and woman regarded one another, palely aglow amidst shadows. He had lidded his biojewel, but she remembered last night’s red-gold. She saw the rising, grinned, and found voice. “It’s mutual, amigo.” Look at her nipples. “But c’mon.” He grinned back, then they both got busy.
Guthrie went into her carryall again and it into the nearer of the sealable plastic bags Valencia had acquired with his burglary kit. Shoes, garments, towels, tools went into the second. He kept the shoulder-holstered pistol he had taken from beneath his jacket. She didn’t know much about firearms, had only done occasional target shooting, but obviously this piece didn’t mind being wet. Bundles in hand, they lowered themselves over the side.
The sea was cool, embracing, a caress over her entire body. She tasted salt on her lips like a kiss. Nonetheless, she realized that in a few hours she’d die of exposure. She could swim to shore before then, of course, but she’d land exhausted. Therefore the guards shouldn’t be watching for intruders from this direction.
The half-dozen Keiki crowded around. She gave her bag to one to hold by his (her?) teeth. Charlie pulled alongside. He must want to be her steed. Fine; that too was mutual. He submerged for her to stretch along his back and lay arms around his neck. Careful to keep her head in the air, he began to move. Valencia got the same service. The deserted boat fell behind.
Muscles flexed powerfully beneath her. Water streamed, stroked, purled by. The Moon climbed higher, bow waves shone white, wakes swirled radiant. Surf, whispering at first, boomed ever louder and deeper. She kept her eyes from the spaceport glare and let herself go free into ocean and Moonlight while still she could.
The beach curved in an arc, shielded by another break-water against which the sea crashed and spouted. When they had rounded it, the Keiki slowed. They knew how to sneak up on quarry. The minutes stretched till the magic snapped across.
Like a brusque arousing, Charlie grated to a halt. Kyra slipped off him and felt sand beneath her soles. They were in the shallows.
She squatted low, head barely above the lapping water. A last time she hugged Charlie, cheek against sleek pelt. “Gracias, gracias,” she breathed. “Mahalo nui loa. Now go. Right away. Hele aku.” Don’t linger, don’t get killed.
He uttered a soft grunt, nuzzled her in the hollow between neck and shoulder, and slipped off. For a few seconds she glimpsed the hasty shapes. They vanished. She and Nero were alone.
They’d better be.
As instructed, she crept ashore and flattened herself. The sand was black and scratchy. Crouched, he glided from her. Above the strand was a strip of grass and shrubs, then the chain link fence and its locked gate, silhouetted against the whiteness from lamps that in her position she could not see. Valencia disapp
eared. She lay with her heartbeat. A breeze fluttered across wet skin and into drenched hair. She shivered.
Valencia returned, wolf-gaited. “All right, I’ve found a spot,” he said in her ear. “Keep low and be quick.”
A man-tall hibiscus bush close to the fence, several meters from the gate, offered concealment. Its flowers hung startlingly bright in the patch of speckled night that it made. The pair could see well enough to towel themselves dry and resume their clothes. Kyra slung the carryall on her back. Guthrie felt weightless. She must be charged to megavolt potential, though consciousness had gone hyalon-clear.
“Your hair’s a mess,” Valencia said low. “We forgot a comb. Let me see if I can straighten it some.”
“Same to you.”
Two monkeys finger-grooming! Kyra silenced laughter and lust.
They puffed away when Valencia stepped from her, took his kit off the ground, and moved to the fence. His cutter buzzed—louder than Niagara? No, no—and links fell apart, each by each by each. He was so brightly illuminated too, a beacon where he stood against the barrier. No, really, the light was dim and tricky. Rip, rip, rip. Severed coils clicked on their neighbors.
He dropped the tool, laid hold of the metal, tugged. It sagged around a narrow gap. He beckoned and eased through. Kyra came after. A raw edge scratched her hand.
“You! Stop!”
Valencia whirled. Motion blurred his right arm. The pistol spat. The bullet trailed a tiny thunderclap.
Valencia was already running. Kyra had barely started when he reached the guard. Did the fallen man stir? Valencia put the pistol to the head. Brain geysered.
Valencia stepped back from the spreading, shimmery pool. “Let’s go,” he said, reholstering his weapon beneath his jacket.
Kyra jerked to a halt and stared. Beyond a narrow lawn, a warehouse loomed sheer, every window lightless. It blocked their view of whatever was behind. That must be a reason Valencia had picked the entry point he did. Lamplight diffused over and around it, harshening the Moonglow but not adding very much. It sufficed to show her the dead man’s face. His half a face. He had been young.
Harvest of Stars Page 24
