Harvest of Stars (14 page)

“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.

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—the
Juliana 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 smidgen 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—”

“Sure, I know. Too bloody far away. What’s on Demeter is reachable
now.”

“Primitive life.”

“All we’ve got. It would’ve been nice if those supposed signals had turned out to be CETI, not a freak of nature, but looks like we’ll have to learn about the universe on our own. So let’s do it.”

“Eh, bien
, if you are not content, we can send anosser spacecraft. First we improve se design, if you spend plenty of money. Also se robots and instruments, yes.” Aulard’s fist crashed on the desk. “But a spacecraft sat can return!
Mon Dieu
, w’y? W’at is wrong wis se data transmission?”

“Inadequate, I repeat. The robots do their earnest best, and it isn’t bad, but nobody has yet come up with an artificial intelligence that’s got anything like real imagination. As witness the attrition among the machines now on Demeter. She keeps springing surprises on them that they can’t always handle. And what angles, what opportunities are they overlooking? No, I want a genuine human mind on the spot; and after a while it will need to come home.”

Aulard gaped for seconds before he muttered,
“Sacrée putain.”

“Hey, don’t get me wrong. I’m not about to saddle you with developing life support systems for that kind of trip. We can’t afford the antimatter to boost so much extra mass. Agreed. What we’ll send is me, or a twin of me that we’ll make when the time comes.”

“—I … ’ave … nossing to say … except sat you—I sought I knew you, but I see I never did. Not se least bit.”

“Aw, the notion isn’t that hairy-brained, Pierre. Really, it isn’t. I’ve played with it for years, run off some computations for myself, and I’m satisfied it can be done on a halfway sober budget. Listen, the reason we have to bring the spacecraft back, though of course we can leave the robots, the reason is simply that I won’t be able to transmit my entire experience. Interference, insufficient bandwidth, quantum effects, you know the physical limitations better than I do. And then there’s everything, hunches, feel, familiarity, that can’t very well be put into words or diagrams. I’ve got to return and download into myself, or what was the point of my going in the first place?”

Aulard spread his palms wide and gazed heavenward. “W’at indeed?” he groaned.

“Easy, amigo. You should thank me. I’m handing you a perfectly gorgeous technical problem. If I know you, for the next several years you’ll wallow in it like a pig in Mississippi mud. Meanwhile, speaking of fluids, I suggest you have a drink. You know where the Scotch is.”

More stars showed, and more, until they were about as many as unaided vision ever saw through this misty air, or from those nature preserves on Earth where the light-haze was unusually thin. Guthrie amplified their illumination until he could continue down the littoral, hoping to come upon something worth the attention of the science machines. It wasn’t integral to his self-created role, for they explored too. However, he had nothing better to do at the moment. While he flattered himself that he had made discoveries and devised procedures which would have been beyond any prewritten program—still, he wanted his contribution to be as large as possible. He was under no necessity of justifying it to the likes of Aulard; he had decreed it, and that was that. But he wanted to.

If Aulard was alive when he returned.

Wind dropped to a lulling. The sea whooshed and rustled. It shimmered black, streaked with starlit foam. Coolness breathed off it. Guthrie stopped. He reached an arm to pick up a shiny object and bring it under his lenses. A piece of shell, iridescent like mother of pearl, nothing he’d seen before on Demeter. Maybe the main database had no record of this either. Maybe it was a clue that should be pursued.

Probably not. You couldn’t research everything. Life on Demeter might not have evolved past an equivalent of Earth’s Cambrian, or Silurian, or whatever the hell you named—meaninglessly, as alien as the whole biology was—but its diversities and subtleties dwarfed the stellar cosmos.

Guthrie held the fragment for a minute or two before he stowed it in his collection locker. Once he and Juliana
found something very similar on a California beach. Abalone shell, she’d exclaimed. But abalone were nearly extinct! They bent their heads over the marvel. Nobody else was around, they were visiting a country whose economy had crashed, the sun, salt, and sand were theirs alone. Her hair fluttered against his cheek. He slipped an arm beneath her tunic, about her waist. She felt warm and smooth. With a glance and a grin, she drew close. For a program in a neural network it was a vivid memory.

Guthrie turned his vision aloft. A brightness, lamplike and unwinking, stood high. It was Phaethon, the rogue planet, which would soon swing through the orbit of Demeter. But that would be at a safe remove. Guthrie chose not to think further ahead. His heed sought the stars beyond.

Constellations and the wan silver of the Milky Way were familiar. His twenty-year voyage had brought him no distance that especially mattered, through the immensity of these galactic outskirts. Of course, the orientation was different. At this hour and this middle latitude, he found Polaris almost straight overhead. His search went onward, past dim red Proxima to Cassiopeia. There an added star outshone the other five: Sol.

“By God, sweetheart,” he called aloud, across the light-years, to her ashes, “we made it!”

“L
ET’S NOT GET
morbid,” Guthrie said. “Better we talk about us.”

Kyra agreed thankfully. “I wish I could simply hop a plane to someplace foreign.” She couldn’t resist, and didn’t think he’d mind: “With you as hand baggage.” Bleakness again: “But the Sepo must have alerted all airport security devices to watch for anything that could be you. We’d be detected the minute I walked into an airport.”

Lee nodded. “Too bad Tahir couldn’t plausibly ship that biobox to Cairo or wherever,” he said.

“That might have been arranged, if we’d had more time,” Guthrie remarked.

Lee’s eyebrows rose. “Really?”

“I expect so. Fiddle with the computer files, write in the clearances and permits and other garbage, and I’d’ve been on my way. But contacting the people who can do that, persuading them, planning the specifics, et cetera, would’ve taken days, which we didn’t have.”