Harvest of Stars

by Poul Anderson

  Communion began.

  —Welcome, rang in him. It was more than words, direct induction from one neural network to the other. He might almost have been thinking to himself, save that the thoughts were hers; he might almost have been rousing from sleep, her dream-voice in him yet, save that this was wholly real and as clear as an alpine pool.

  —Oh, well are you come! she sang. Through and around it throbbed her life. He knew apples thrusting to ripeness, a play of muscles against furious water, terror and oblivion and blood iron-sharp in a fox’s mouth. Then her spirit embraced his, and lesser sensings lost themselves in her.

  They had no need of questions. Nonetheless he set forth what troubled him as plainly as he was able. That made it plainer to him.

  —Those two selves of mine who went to the nearer stars, they weren’t gone too long. When they came back, we fitted together easily enough. I added their memories, parallel in time, to my memories of staying put, and that was that. But this latest, he found so much that was strange, and things at home changed so much while he was away—first and foremost, you, querida—Nothing makes entire sense. Demeter seems more foreign than Bion did. You do, which is worst of all. … Of course it’s just a matter of assimilation. I can come to terms with it. But if you’ll help, I can do that this day.

  —I feel the strife, she said, as well as I can who am not human.

  —Nor am I any more, he reminded her wryly.

  —This is not the only thing you seek of me.

  —No. It’s very little, laid beside what I’m really after. First, though, I’ve got to set my mind to rights.

  —We shall seek oneness.

  She had brought him there in the past, to the limits of his gift. He dwelt isolated among machines and had never ceased to think like a male. But she could take him into her life and patiently, tenderly, make a part of him be, for a spell, a part of it.

  Interweaving, the hare perishes that the fox may live and herbage flourish for young hares. … Rootlets crumble stone, the plant dies and mingles its decay with the grains to make soil for new roots interweaving. … Pollen blows on the wind, sperm spouts in passion, the ovum bids it home and the helices fall to their interweaving …

  While shadows lengthen,

  A dandelion and bee

  Exchange tomorrows.

  —I’m whole.

  —Then behold.

  It was perhaps not intentional, perhaps association as his purpose came to the fore in their conjoined selves. Her perceptions closed on a scene and gave it to his awareness as if he were present, alive.

  Nightside. He saw the and interior of Caria. Milky Way and stars beswarmed blackness. Their light washed over a mesa and the plain beneath, shadowless silver-gray, so bright that even down yonder the eye found wide-spaced sagebrush and gaunt saguaro. Air lay quiet, frosty, tinged with smoke from a campfire smoldering into embers.

  A man and woman stood at the brink of the mesa, on which they had pitched their tent and staked their horses. Well-clad in wool and leather, they must be nomads of this country. She huddled against him.

  “It’s cold, cold,” she said. The breath puffed from her lips, a cloud quickly lost.

  He held her close. “The real cold is in us, I fear,” he answered.

  Her hand stroked her belly. She was pregnant. “Will she dare to bear a child?”

  “We may hope it. A grandchild of ours, whose children will escape the death of Demeter.”

  “If a ship has the space. They’ll be too many, won’t they? We shouldn’t have—”

  “Hush. Don’t let slip your bravery. We swore we’d not wait out our lives helpless.”

  “Yes. We swore. We’ll make what we can of what we have. Kiss me.”

  At Guthrie’s behest, Demeter withdrew from them. Surely they had left their tribe to decide undisturbed whether their daughter should be born.

  Seas, rivers, woods, prairies, burrows underground, heavens overhead became the setting for Demeter and Guthrie.

  —I don’t like eavesdropping, he said.

  —To me, that was not what we did, she replied. Those two are of the world I watch over.

  —The world that you are. (Pain flared.) Which will go under. Unless—

  —They who despair, not for themselves but for those who shall come after them into this universe where we are a fugitive chemical accident … were they in your thoughts as you traveled?

  —I can’t honestly claim that. I don’t have your sort of mothering love. But, well, relativistic time contraction or no, I had plenty of years to think, and found more to think about than I’d imagined could be.

  —Your quest, your odyssey. Often I looked at the stars and envied you, Anson. (Ardor flamed.) Recall for me!

  He let it flow free, not as a tale, which he would tell later, piece by piece, season after season, but as moments flying past like spindrift off an ocean.

  —The ship at full velocity. A faint radiance hazed space, bow wave of screen fields flinging interstellar atoms aside. Beyond it gaped a cyclopean void, where aberration and Doppler effect had driven the stars from vision-except dead forward, a hundred thousand blue-white, clustered around a luminosity that was the cosmic background itself. Guthrie contemplated it for months before he told his attendant robot to shut him off.

  —After ten shipboard years and three-fourths of a light-century, he was awakened. The vessel was well into deceleration, constellations blossoming back into sight around her.

  —Bion. A glass-green sea from whose depths wings burst through waves and soared into the air. A forest of Gothic arches in which hung scarlet curtains and crystal-line chimes resounded. A mountain enmeshed from its snowpeak to its foothills by a single violet vine, home to creatures of uncounted kinds. Rainfall, in each drop an embryo that came to term while it fell, springing free when it struck. Animals that built cities of faerie grace but showed hardly more wit than ants. Other animals that made use of sharp sticks and stones. Other animals that did not, although they tended fires. …

  A neighbor globe orbited the same sun. While life on it was as rudimentary as life had been on Demeter when first he arrived, microbes attacking rock had blanketed land with loam and two moons kept the seas brisk. Here, better than at Beta Hydri or 82 Eridani, were the makings of a New Earth. But ships that could bring humans to it must crawl, their cargoes shriveled to corpses. …

  —Homebound. The outside again going alien. Memories of what lay behind. If only, if only…. Of course it was impossible, a hope Guthrie had cast from him hundreds of years ago when he could no longer endure it. Not so?

  —That other me didn’t know what we’d learned from the sophotects on Earth before they cut us off, he said. More important, oh, much more, he didn’t know what you’d become, your maturity. I who stayed here knew, but hadn’t thought what it might mean. Too busy, or—or too afraid I’d prove wrong. … Somehow, when he and I came together, the disorientation, the, the craziness—Can chaos be creative?

  —It is the fountainhead of creation, Demeter told him. It rises from a reality that will forever surprise us with newness if we open ourselves to it, being greater than we can conceive; and yet we can grow into it. … (Meditation) Why did I not see? Was I likewise too deeply engaged, or too afraid? This could make me forsake my living world for years on end, to its terrible hurt. But it is foredoomed, whatever I choose. If, from its death, there should come life unbounded—

  —Yes, she breathed through the leaves, yes, I think, feel, believe the power may indeed be mine—

  —Yes! she cried triumphant.

  Her spirit seized his. For a span they whirled away together through her forests and her fields, down into her waters and aflight in her thunderstorms, up toward their stars and their vision. She was Demeter Mother, but she was also Kyra, Eiko, and everything he remembered of Juliana.

  62

  TO MAKE ANEW the flesh and bone of Anson Guthrie, a task not lightly undertaken, was the first and smallest step in the enterprise.<
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  Like his colonists, he had put his medical record into the database that went with them from Sol to Centauri; like theirs, his included the map of his genome. True, the information concerned a man whose ashes had long lain at rest on the Moon, mingled with those of the wife of his manhood. No physician would evoke it, seeking the best treatment for an illness or the best advice to give a prospective parent. However, the mass that it added to the total was effectively zero; and someday, somehow, he might want it, or somebody else might.

  Thus when the day incredibly came, the instructions were there to encode for the nanomachinery. Molecular assemblers went to work. From the solutions and gels in the tank they drew what they needed; they built the DNA and RNA strands of cell and mitochondrion, they fashioned the zygote and set it to functioning, they guided its proliferation and differentiations.

  What grew in that fabricated womb was no fetus. It could have been, were such desired. A few times on Earth, a few persons had been rich enough and vain enough to raise children who were clones of themselves. Guthrie was never tempted, and now it would have defeated his intention. He required a body young but fully developed. An infantile or juvenile brain could not have coped with what he meant to give it. The knowledge, so much and so various, would overburden to destruction, insanity. And if he first let the clone mature, it would be too late. A distinct personality would have formed, memories and synapse patterns set, resistant to any downloading imposed on it until it likewise collapsed under the impact.

  Even for an adult unconscious in darkness and silence, the operation had formerly been impossible. This was no tabula rasa, passively waiting to be written upon. A programmable network, like the one into which old Guthrie had been copied, was. It received the data piece by piece as neurons were scanned and the information in them transmitted. Not until everything was there, fully coordinated, was the program activated. A new awareness sprang into being as a complete entity.

  The reverse was altogether different. Although artifice kept the clone alive while he lay in the tank, he did live. He metabolized. He kept going the manifold homeostases necessary for hour-to-hour survival. His brain, devoid of thought, nonetheless grew steadily busier as it advanced, coordinating the whole, secretion, excretion, flow of impulses and juices, rhythms of heart and smooth muscles. It began, vaguely, to dream.

  Bit-by-bit input of what was outside its experience could not happen, because the living nervous system could never be still. By its very nature it must distort those meaningless fragments, scatter them, suppress them, get rid of them.

  Guthrie knew no way of imposing his entirety on it in a single instantaneous assault. Had he possessed devices for that, they would have been worse than useless. Some conditioned reflexes might be established, but the brain is not made to learn in any such fashion. It needs time to assimilate knowledge.

  First, it must provide itself with redundancy, copies of each molecular-level trace, because quantum fluctuations degrade them and if it has no replacements the memory will soon be lost. Second, the mind is not a separate thing quartered somewhere in the head. It is a subset—large, among humans, but still a subset—of what the whole organism does. That organism can no more learn immediately how to be a particular person than it can learn immediately how to walk a tightrope or play a violin or stop fearing death. To force it would be to break it.

  Therefore download Guthrie had not supposed a man Guthrie would again walk the world: until Demeter came to her flowering.

  Neither her powers nor her intellect were unbounded. They transcended the human, but that which was at Sol could have scorned them, had it deigned to be petty. Or perhaps not. What it was and what she was were incommensurable. Is a lightning bolt superior to an ocean tide? Demeter was the unity of a living planet, as the brain and nerves are the unity of a single creature. Although they do not control each cell, they keep the cells in harmony, and at need they call upon all to act as one. So did she reign over her billions.

  Bach did not compose with his veins, lungs, legs, gonads, or even his heart. His ears gave him knowledge of sound, his hands worked keyboards and wrote down scores, but in a later age those services could have been provided him robotically. Yet it was no disembodied cerebrum that adored God and wrought the Mass in B Minor; it was the whole human being.

  In similar wise—crude analogy; words are weak—Demeter’s mind and spirit were of all her lives. Multitudinousness became magnitude. The ultimate organism, she knew the organic as no machine by itself ever would. Insight so broad and deep went further still, to the quantum level and its mysteries; hers were observations that, within their range, reconciled the paradoxes.

  If she could steer the destiny and heal the self-inflicted wounds of a biosphere, she could guide the genesis of an individual.

  It was not easy. As she foresaw, immense thought—and computation—must go beforehand, and then for hundreds of days her full attention was engaged, while she fed her nursling with Guthrie and, governing, upholding, led the blind spirit into existence. At that, it was an experiment with many unknowns. This was a reason why he had decreed that he be the first subject. “A decent comandante doesn’t send his men into any risk he won’t try. If we fail, it’ll be an Anson Guthrie who suffers, and me who takes the responsibility. If the thing suffers too horribly, I will kill it.”

  But what the robots finally raised from the tank, what drew a breath and looked from side to side, was a strong young man. While naturally he needed some intensive training and conditioning, from the start his identity stood forth beyond any mistake.

  In him dwelt memories and loves reaching back to a childhood on Earth, forward to voyages between the stars. They did not include everything that had happened to the download; the storage capacity of the brain has its limits, and his own life awaited him. However, he knew enough, and he could look up the rest whenever he desired, or hear it from the father who was himself.

  Meanwhile Demeter, heartened by success, embarked on a creation more daring. In part, it was done to increase her knowledge and skill. In part, it was to provide a symbol, an incarnation; man does not live by reason alone, and the times to come would try men’s souls. In part, it was to serve a purpose that would outlive her.

  The next DNA template was not exclusively Kyra’s. Mingled were elements of Eiko’s, for she too must be in the reembodiment. Guthrie hoped, he believed, that something of Juliana would also come back; over the centuries, whenever he and Demeter linked, they had shared that ghost, and now the being who took form in the nascent human was Demeter herself.

  Partial, yes—a hint, a fragrance, a fleeting vision. The woman could only know in full what it had been to be women. She could only go on to live in her own right, a mortal. But in her should abide the seed of what was more than human, another and greater Demeter on many another world.

  She opened her eyes. She smiled.

  63

  WHEN THEIR FIRST-BORN had turned six years of age, Anson and Demeter Daughter brought him to the sanctum on Lifthrasir Tor. They could have given him at home the meeting to which they went, but to come here made a ceremony of it, and they felt that was wanted. Moreover, the rare privilege of visiting in person roused in him an excitement, an eagerness, that they hoped would bear him past any terrors. Some of the questions he was lately asking had answers that disquieted grown men.

  An autumn wind blew wild across the highlands. It harried clouds over one sun and then the next, so that light fell in spearshafts bright or dim, blinked out, and struck anew, while shadows raced beneath. A flight of geese trekked on it; their cries shrilled faint through its bluster, as if already they were afar. Evergreens stood doubly dark, broadleaf trees startlingly red and yellow, against grass turned wan. Those on the hilltop roared with wind. It carried odors of rain-wet heath, sharp as itself.

  The building was quiet and softly illuminated. A robot conducted the guests to a room that the parents knew well. There stood chairs, a table set with a goblet of nectar and t
wo of wine, a multiceiver. At the moment the view in it was of a seashore, surf thunderous green and white, gulls, ice plant in purple bloom behind the dunes. The scan swept slowly inland, to meadows where horses cropped, on to a sequoia forest and up a mountainside, the living world.

  There also stood download Guthrie, in his body that recalled an ancient knight. “Hello,” he greeted, and stooped to shake hands with Noboru. They knew one another well, he romped and told stories and sang songs, but today he made a point of respecting the dignity of the child.

  “Welcome,” said the low voice that was Demeter Mother’s. “Be at ease. This too is your home.”

  “Thank you,” Noboru whispered. She had spoken to him before, but always, inescapably, she was the Presence, however gentle or even playful. He took his seat between Anson and Demeter Daughter, gripped his goblet, but did not lift it.

  Guthrie sat down opposite; he ought not to loom over them. “Yes, do relax, lad,” he urged. “Enjoy. Your folks tell us you’ve been wondering about some things, and think we could help. Not that you can’t learn it from them or at school or on your own, but—well, you’re pretty special to us, and we’d like you to know we aren’t just odd kinfolk of yours, we’re your friends.”

  “Don’t go getting the kid above himself,” Anson laughed.

  “Ha!” snorted Guthrie. “Just you wait till you’re a granddad.”

  “I’ll dote every bit as hard as he, I’m sure,” said Demeter Daughter.

  The banter encouraged Noboru. “When will that be?” he piped, and gulped from his drink. “On this planet?”

  “We don’t know, dear,” replied his mother. “You and your wife will decide that, if you aren’t on one of the other planets when you meet her.”

  Noboru gave her a look. He half understood that she and his father had had a destiny; what was hard to grasp was that nobody else did. Of course, she was unique in her beauty—tall, slim, golden-skinned, black locks falling past high cheekbones, finely molded features, forthright hazel eyes—as his father was unique in his ruggedness and boisterous mirths. But that was because they were his parents.