Harvest of Stars

by Poul Anderson

  Air hissed into the lock chamber beyond and the car proceeded down a ramp to a garage. The hewn-out pillars and vaulting that supported its roofs were of a strangeness that soared, as if—she thought, knowing it was ridiculous—Shwe Dagon had bred with Chartres. The car stopped, its own valves turned, the travelers emerged. She breathed a perfume like roses, and that was perhaps the strangest of all.

  An attendant genuflected. He was dressed somewhat like Isabu, in the understatedly sumptuous style of Lunarian formality. She would learn that, while there was no prescribed livery, this was usual for the staff, except when some task made it inappropriate. No special insignia identified them. They knew whose they were, and so did their optimates.

  Arren offered her his arm. She remembered what was proper and held her arm just above, fingertips touching his hand. The position was easy to maintain in this gravity. It would have been the same were their sexes reversed, a graceful way of denoting that she was his social superior.

  Isabu came behind. They crossed the floor, ascended a curving staircase, and went down a passage. It was lined with hydroponic tanks in which rioted the hues of curiously petalled flowers.

  It gave on a large room. Furnishings were sparse, spindly-framed, shaped to suggest vines and serpents. Kyra scarcely noticed, because floor, walls, ceiling were a single abstract mosaic. The softly multicolored patterns seduced her gaze; she could easily have lost herself in them. A picture window, its view of the gorge below and the peaks beyond under stars, did not interrupt; it was a culmination.

  Two persons waited. They stood, as Lunarians did more often than sit—tall, slim, ornamental iridescent cloaks of spider-silk thinness falling from their shoulders. Kyra recognized Rinndalir, whom she had last seen on the multi in the Launch Pad … a hundred years ago? His tunic and hose were black, trimmed with silver. She remembered, also, the friezelike gold headband across the argent hair. The woman at his side wore a full-length aquamarine gown over which diode lights played. In features she might have been his twin sister, but the great slant eyes were green and the waist-length mane shone blue-black.

  Arren and Isabu genuflected. Unsurely, Kyra gave a Fireball salute.

  Rinndalir smiled. For that instant, his visage came aglow, and Kyra’s heart stumbled. “So this is Pilot Davis of the disputed ship.” His English purred. Clearly, the men had been in contact with him while they traveled. “Be welcome, my lady. Have you any immediate need that we may serve?”

  “No. Nothing, gracias,” she stammered, and felt like a slewfooted fool.

  Rinndalir made the least of gestures toward the other woman. “My lady Niolente,” he said. She inclined her head as slightly—courteous, condescending, or what?

  “I, I’m happy to meet you,” Kyra said. Half angrily: Why was she letting them overawe her? She was Fireball. If ever they should be at odds, Fireball could smash them and theirs flat. Right now it needed their help. But that would be to their own advantage. She got control of her voice. “I’ve important news for you.”

  “Manifestly,” said Niolente. She was a mezzo-soprano. She glanced at Arren and Isabu. “Hold yourselves in readiness for possible questions.” Doubtless’she said it in English out of politeness to Kyra. They bent the knee again and departed.

  “Make yourself comfortable, Pilot Davis,” invited Rinndalir. “Are you certain you will not have something to eat or drink before we speak?”

  “No—no—” The tale rushed out of her. The Lunarians aided it with questions that struck to the bone, however softly put. She could not tell how much intensity was underneath.

  At the end, Rinndalir paced to the window. He stood for a few seconds looking out at the galaxy before he asked, “What would you have us do, Pilot Davis?”

  She shivered, and irrationally resented Niolente’s calm, and cried, “Tell the Solar System! Retrieve Guthrie! Get those muck-begotten ideos thrown out of space!”

  “It is not quite that simple,” Niolente murmured. “This is a chaotic universe. The consequences of actions are seldom foreseeable.”

  Rinndalir turned around. His glance locked on Kyra. “Yes,” he said as calmly, “we had best bide our time until we know more and have thought more.”

  The knowledge pierced her: They would keep her waiting here.

  27

  WANG ZU WAS a modest man, but Thermopylae-loyal to Fireball. As a dispatcher, he had access to the computer net that directed and kept track of space activities around L-5; and he was generally alone when on duty. As a close friend, he heard the plea of Noboru Tamura’s daughter, did not press her to explain the purpose she dared not reveal, and agreed to do what she wished. Any suspicions he had, he kept to himself.

  “I will co-opt the mechanician Lucia Visconti,” he said. “You know her somewhat, I believe. She is trustworthy. Still, all she will be told is to ignore the call to work that she will receive tomorrow and stay at home for the next—ten hours, will that provide an ample margin? What one does not know, one cannot reveal.”

  If arrested and quizzed. An ugly thrill went through Eiko. She herself didn’t even know what it was she sought. Derring-do was for people like Kyra Davis, not her … Kyra had gone to Earth on the most routine of missions, and vanished. Fireball had overnight made alliance with its decades-enduring antagonists and let them within its gates. They had imprisoned Eiko’s father and everyone else near to Anson Guthrie, seemingly with Guthrie’s agreement, perhaps at his command. Nothing made sense. Somebody had to make a start at unsnarling the nightmare.

  Her preparations, however inconspicuously carried out, kept her too busy for much fear. And then the hour of action was upon her.

  Reporting to the appropriate station, she logged in as Visconti, detailed to troubleshoot a minor problem with offloading from the Pallas. No human saw her. The Sepo hadn’t enough men to mount guard over every portal. Besides, watchers would have been worse than useless, ignorant about operations, irritatingly or perhaps disastrously in the way. Instead, they had the net monitor all activity for them and alert them to whatever might be unusual. Wang had simply entered a notation of this job. No living soul was aboard the sunjammer to give him the lie.

  It was slow and awkward for Eiko, securing herself in the boostsuit and checking the numerous systems. Like all colonists, she’d had some training in EVA and refreshed it regularly in a vivifer. Like most, from time to time she went outside briefly for pleasure. That, though, was in her own spacesuit, with a low-powered simple jetpack, at the end of a tether to the excursion boat. The boostsuit could hold a big man; she must adjust the interior fittings by appropriate motions of her confined body till she was snug. The four arms and their hands were waldos, which she had seldom used and never for serious work. Much of the view through the hyalon turret consisted of an instrument panel curving up from the breast. Other information was conveyed by beeps, flashes, or tingles in her fingers. Her drive was a high-thrust ion motor and an array of delicately controllable turn jets. Her life support was not for a few hours but for a possible several days, complex and—invasive. Racked around the armor was a variety of tools and other objects, many of which she could not handle, some of which she could not name.

  When first she considered doing this, she had felt utterly daunted. Best she get someone else, someone experienced. No. Still less did she know how to organize a conspiracy, and she hadn’t time to learn. Where it came to plain facts, she was a quick study. She put instructions from the public database into her vivifer at home and practiced. Surely the Sepo didn’t consider her worth surveillance. She learned that the equipment was highly automated, possessed of a versatile program, forgiving of mistakes.

  —Her mouth was dry, her tongue like wood. She set lips to nipple, swished the water around, swallowed it, and could speak. “Ready for task.”

  “Begin countdown” said the robot voice in her ear. She was moved forward on rails into the launch lock. A valve shut behind her. The steel barrenness of the chamber darkened as air was pumped out. Th
e second valve opened on streaming stars. “Ten,” became audible. “Nine. Eight. … Zero.”

  The catapult gave her a harder shock than she had expected. Night swallowed her. A mumble and a pulse throbbed for a moment as the side jets killed residual spin. Her motor assumed proper orientation and fired, to add its component to the velocity she had from the great momentum bank that was L-5. It went silent again. She was on trajectory, falling free.

  Confined, she could not revel in weightlessness, which had never sickened her, but she could look around.

  Spaceward, stars beswarmed blackness and the Milky Way clove it with ice. To one side, a gibbous Luna showed small, an orphan wandering lost. In the Earthward direction, her turret darkened itself lest the sun blind her. Well, at this time of orbit she’d have seen only a thin sickle of the planet.

  Trailing the Moon by sixty degrees, Ragaranji-Go gained splendor when she receded and saw it as a whole, colossal cylinder and tapering ends a-spin, a-sheen, shadow-play over locks, masts, domes, towers, dishes, a thousand structures and instrumentalities, fireflies around it that were boats, workers, machines, everydayness triumphant in heaven. Elsewhere gleamed a whirling disc, tiny at its distance but growing, the sun-sail of Pallas, hove to while robots discharged gases, minerals, treasures brought from the kingdom of Jupiter.

  That was Eiko’s nominal destination. Now that she was loose, the sooner she changed her vectors, the better.

  She had not dared carry anything written or otherwise recorded. Were she perchance stopped and searched, how would she have explained it? The numbers were in her head. She was good at memorizing—languages, histories, poems, on down to lists of what she might buy that would please her kinfolk and their children. The position of an object at some instant and the elements of its orbit were easy.

  Obtaining them had been something else. Her father could have led her through his reasoning, had he been given the chance. As was, she must reconstruct it. The message: A launcher, due to pass detectably close, though farther than a thousand kilometers, on the 23rd. He had said that suggested it started near Earth, from a Luna-bound ship, three days earlier. This was merely one possibility, but the most obvious, and when you were limited to a few words you did not become esoteric.

  The boundary conditions defined a sheaf that was unmanageably large. However, Eiko decided, whoever set the launcher on its course had no way of knowing whether it would be met on the first pass. The contents must be precious. Therefore s/he would not put it on any orbit that would take it into the deeps, soon to become unrecoverable as perturbations and other influences worked on it in chaotic fashion. S/he would give it an eccentric path around Earth, swinging out not much past L-5 before bending back. This path should be reasonably stable, good for at least several passes before it was badly displaced and distorted. Best would be also, from a stability viewpoint, if it had some resonance with L-5, bringing it repeatedly near the colony. These restrictions diminished the sheaf by a huge factor. Furthermore, they hinted at where and when the ship had left Earth.

  Eiko ran a computation. She gave the results to Wang. He accessed data gathered by the automata on meteoroid watch. Their radars had registered half a dozen objects that fitted. She told him no more, but took the data home and ran them through again, feeding in her ideas about the ship. A single body qualified—a blip, noted, tracked intermittently for some hours, found to be no threat, entered in the database, otherwise not studied nor brought to human attention. A rock, a scrap … or a launcher flying cold. She worked out a best estimate of its orbit and fixed the values in her brain.

  Had Wang calculated backward and guessed what she was thinking of? She didn’t ask, he didn’t say.

  Now, slowly and clumsily, she keyboarded an order to the boostsuit. Cancel flight plan. New instructions to follow. She could have spoken it, but there was still a radio link to the coordinator at her takeoff station and she didn’t want that machine passing her words on to the dispatcher. The parameters had not allowed this to be a time when Wang was in charge. She wasn’t being monitored, though; following each EVA was quite unfeasible. If she kept quiet, she could change course unnoticed. Space was that big.

  Feeding in the fresh numbers, she made repeated mistakes, sighed, backtracked, and tried again. Kyra, she thought, would have had some colorful if unvoiced curses. But Kyra wouldn’t have found this task difficult. Eiko tried to keep herself aware that these too were simply moments in eternity.

  They ended. She activated the program. The boostsuit rotated and started its drive motor. Acceleration pressed Eiko into the padding around her. It ceased after a while and she flew again weightless, toward rendezvous. At first her pulse ruffled and her breath rustled loud in an infinite stillness. Then slowly she forgot them, knew only the stars, sent her spirit outward and outward among them.

  A beeping recalled her. Amazed, she read how much time had passed. The launcher glimmered ahead, pencil-small. It grew. She ordered the boostsuit to lay alongside. Energy susurrated, velocity changes tugged, but gently. She spied welding seams and rivet heads, picked out by their sharp shadows; this planetoid had no landscape to diffuse sunlight. She felt and heard a slight bump. She had arrived.

  The stars had removed her anxieties from her. Thus it proved surprisingly easy to operate her gear. Not that it had anything difficult to do. She undogged the hatch cover, swung it back, and pulled herself forward till she could look into the cargo bay. Blackness. She turned on a headlight.

  Twin reflections glittered back. The box within had extended its eyestalks to look at her.

  She choked on a scream. “Guthrie-san—” Beware, the radio. No, that connection routinely broke at a certain distance. Ragaranji-Go was a spindle near the Milky Way, no longer than the Moon was wide.

  Did this braincase, linked to nothing, have a radio capability of its own? She tried speaking to it. Silence jeered. Perhaps she just had the wrong frequency. Orbiting farther every second, she mustn’t linger. And, to avoid drawing possible attention, she should take a roundabout course home, one that appeared to originate at the sunjammer; there went more time. She activated the lesser pair of hands, released the clamps securing the box, took it forth, stowed it in a chest attached to the front of her armor.

  Crazily, she giggled. Was this any way to treat Guthriesan, overlord of Fireball? Bringing him in like a retrieved rock or—or as if she were pregnant with him?

  Her wits resurged. She instructed the boostsuit methodically, almost skillfully. It started off. The launcher dwindled from view.

  On that flight she had ample opportunity to think, but little more to think about. She had made her preparations at home for concealing whatever she brought back, if it was concealable and if there was need. Clearly, there was. The Sepo scarcely expected such an advent, but they were poised and organized for trouble, they had all the lethal weapons in the colony, if necessary they would shut down its communications while they called their masters for help. Much too readily could Eiko imagine what would follow.

  Or could she? Was it Guthrie she carried? He had spoken from Quito, hadn’t he? And when he did, the launcher was already on its way. For her father’s sake, for everybody’s, she must hide this thing till she knew more. That might be the very worst move she could make. It seemed like the best, though. Hers was the responsibility for whatever came of it. She had acted, she had thrown the stone into the pool, and now the waves spreading ineluctably outward bore her with them.

  Again she sought peace in the galaxy. It fled her. At last she forced her mind to compose. That was a kind of work, something in which to lose fear, doubt, grief. It was mechanical, of course, devoid of any true inspiration, but it kept her occupied until Ragaranji-Go loomed sheer ahead.

  In snowfall of stars

  Those we see red are not old—

  An early winter.

  She rejected it with disdain but not without gratitude.

  “Visconti returning,” she said. “Request entry.” The coordinator ac
knowledged and took control. She should have been glad, as amateurish as she was, but after her hours a-flit she felt abruptly, queasily helpless.

  Alone among machines, she fumbled her way out of the suit and opened the chest. Leaning over it, she whispered, “Not a word, not a sound before I tell you we are safe.”

  She clenched her teeth and lifted him out. Who might be watching on the audiovisual pickup? At least the sight meant nothing to the robots. Yet she went to the dressing cubicle in as casual a saunter as she could achieve. Once there she slipped him into the carryall she had brought along, as people often did for objects they might want outside, and exchanged the skinsuit for her subdued kimono.

  Luck was kind. In the corridor leading away she met nobody who would wonder what she did here. At the first upramp she left it, and soon mingled into the crowd along Onizuka Passage.

  The district lacked its normal bustle and cheer but remained busy enough, being commercial rather than residential. L-5 was more than a city, staging point, entrepôt, site for specialized industries, and tourist attraction. Its ten million people made up a society, distinct and complete, multiracial but united, with its own laws, mores, arts, fashions, traditions, orientations—cosmopolitan yet turned spaceward as much as Earthward, pragmatic and hard-working yet respectful of culture and obsessed with education, conceived in liberty yet strict about rules for the common survival, enterprising yet content to be governed by a directorate that answered to Fireball. Dwellers walked briskly, talked fast, footfalls and voices a surf around them. Garments ran to bright hues. Some, like Eiko’s, harked back: a Sikh in his turban, a Malay in his sarong, a Kirghiz in her embroidered jacket, others whom she could not so easily identify. A number were obviously visitors from Earth. They looked the most apprehensive. And were the least threatened, she thought.

  Shopfronts sparkled and beckoned. Animations enticed at theaters, restaurants, amusement arcades. Music lilted. For some reason she briefly compared all of it to Tychopolis. This was nothing that exotic. This was a prosperous modern Terrestrial community, transplanted, stream-lined, polished, decorated here and there with curving eaves, gilt dragons, calligraphic banners. These were ordinary folk, fully human. Their ceiling simulated blue sky and sunlit clouds. Come nightwatch it would go starry, at festival times it would depict fireworks.