Harvest of Stars (21 page)

“It’s good of you to care, Consuelo,” she said. “Yes, let’s by all means rendezvous later. I may get involved myself this evenwatch, but … tomorrow? Yes, yes, we’ll stay in touch.”

Unworthily glad to escape, she moved toward the bar. The Launch Pad was as antique as its name indicated, tables and chairs crowded together, a dart board, random souvenirs of spacefaring piled high on dusty shelves, photos and cards stuck blanketingly thick on the walls and faded with time. A multi offered chromokinetic accompaniment to a muted rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth. You didn’t come here to gape at it but to meet your lodge siblings. You didn’t describe this place to groundlings, nor respond much to any tourist who happened in. The proper customers were spacers of every trade and their Earthside associates. Therefore the majority were Fireball—including, of course, those from L-5, special though their status was—and the allegiances of the minority divided among half a dozen lesser organizations.

Several of them who noticed Kyra recognized her and cried greetings. She hailed back, happy again, and bellied up to the bar. “Welcome home, gorgeous,” caroled Rory Donovan behind it. “You’ve been gone unconscionably long, you have. Once more this mill is worth running. What’s your wish, darling, the usual?”

“Yes, gracias, a draft Keplerbräu. And, uh, for openers, a shot of aqualunae, chilled.” You could have imports if you were willing to pay the cost, but the local stuff was fine.

The bartender busied himself. “When and where’s your next voyage?” he asked. She understood that he knew about her latest. Word from everywhere around the System reached Tychopolis, by laser if not by ship. “Far in the future, I’m hoping.”

“They haven’t decided,” she said. “What’s going on that’s fun?”

“A colleen like you needn’t ask or look. It’ll find you. There you are. On the house, this round.” At her thanks:

“No, no, it’s I am owing you, as bright as you make my heart.”

“You say that to every woman who comes in, Rory. And we love it.”

He grinned, then had to go take an order. No robot would replace him while he lasted. Ugly as Avantism, Rory was, but he didn’t need to get his face remodeled, the way he could blarney.

He might have done so when he was young, crossed Kyra’s mind. Surely then he wanted to give the girls more than blarney. However, his body—He wasn’t obviously deformed. It was an inner thing. He lived his life on the Moon, in poor health, because he wouldn’t survive any reasonable span on Earth unless bonded to machines and chemical tanks. Not a metamorph; an adapt, relic of an experiment that hadn’t paid off. The genes that handled low-weight for him weren’t intrinsic, they’d been added after his birth, and they didn’t mesh with his own as effectively as had been hoped. Hardly any like him remained. She’d never known whether his cheerfulness was genuine or a shield.

Crack, why did she let darkness keep thrusting in on her? She sought the tang of her liquor, the sparkle of the beer.

“Ah, Pilot Davis. Good evenwatch.”

She turned. The man who had come to her side was blond, well-clad, attractive. “Perhaps you do not remember me,” he said. His English was guttural. “Hans Gieseler. We met last year at a party in Heidelberg.”

She recalled now. He was Fireball, a symbolic analyst, techno-economic interface. They’d talked about travels. He’d recommended several spots in Europe, and indeed she enjoyed those she afterward visited. He had a nice smile. When they shook hands, his clasp was straightforward. “What brings you to Luna?” she asked.

“A somewhat peculiar mission. Excuse me. Bartender, another glass of chablis. And may I reinforce yours, Pilot Davis?”

“Wait, I’ve barely begun,” she laughed.

“I hope I am not being—
anmassend
—presumptuous. The truth is, I was feeling rather lonely after a difficult day, and you are the first person known to me who has come in here.”

Kyra relaxed onto a stool. “Bueno, I should go around and say hola to my friends, but they all seem occupied at the moment.”

“They will seek you out in any case. While I have the chance, how have you fared?”

“Muy bien, gracias.” Curiosity piqued. “What is this mysterious mission of yours?”

“Nothing secret, although we do not publicize. You may well be aware that the company would like a third staging satellite in Lunar orbit. The Selenarchs refuse. They give various objections, but we suspect that principally they do not want more ground control and support personnel of ours on the Moon. I programmed and ran an inquiry, finding that the benefits to them will outweigh any inconvenience we bring. They studied it, said they were not convinced, but invited Fireball to send a spokesman. For some reason, not only the time lag, they prefer to negotiate in personal presence. I have been hours with Rinndalir and his underlings.”

Kyra whistled. “Rinndalir? From what I’ve heard, at least you’ve started as near the top as they’ve got. How was it?”

“Oh, they were unfailingly gracious, but always I sense the steel underneath and the—
Mutwilligkeit?
—trickiness, wantonness? No, that is not the correct word. Steel, yes, but also mercury, and in them courses electricity—”

A voice cut through the noise, softly as a whetted blade through cloth. It was the baritone of a singer, speaking but vibrant with half-heard overtones, the English accented like none that ever was on Earth. “Hans Gieseler of Fireball Enterprises.”

What the blaze! Every look in the room went to the multi. Its cylinder was big enough to hold, life size, a holo of head and upper torso. The face was marble-white, a vein blue in the throat. High cheekbones flanked great eyes
gray as ice. The straight nose flared at the nostrils, the mouth was redeemed from feminine fullness by the pointed chin beneath. Silvery hair fell to the shoulders, past ears whose convolutions were not normal human. A goldwork fillet crossed the brow and iridescence played over the black tunic.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Rory whispered, “it’s himself.”

Rinndalir, Kyra knew. She’d seen few images of Lunarian lords and ladies, they were seldom out in public, but there was no mistaking Gieseler’s expression.

“I have been in touch with my colleagues,” the voice purred. “We wish to discuss further those questions that you raised. Please return immediately to your hotel. Transport for you and your effects will be waiting. Forgive this haste, I pray. Certain urgencies are involved. Thank you.”

The bust vanished. Colors and music came back. For seconds more, silence held the people.

Gieseler shook his head as if stunned. “I have … never met the like before,” he muttered. “How did he know where I am? How did he pre-empt this set? Or did he everywhere?”

“What’ll you do about it?” Kyra asked stupidly.

Gieseler straightened. “I go. What else? I dare not risk offending them.”

Rory plucked his sleeve and said against a rising uproar, “Hold on a mite, me boy. It would not surprise me at all, at all, are those rascals of a mind to wear you down and win a better bargain than they deserve.”

“I can merely recommend.” Gieseler tried to tug free.

“Even so, it’s supperless you are, and I’ll wager the hour will be late before they offer refreshment. Let me fix you a sandwich to eat on your way to the hotel. It will take but a minute.”

“Good idea,” Kyra said. Gieseler nodded jerkily. Thereafter he had to reply as best he could to those who swarmed around him wanting to know what this was about. The agitation pursued him to the door.

It wasn’t that anybody felt hostile to the Selenarchy, Kyra knew. Lunarians might not be the most likable folk alive, but you were safe from crime here, they didn’t bother you if you didn’t bother them, and in their fashion they too were
space
. It had been natural for your parents to rejoice when the Moon declared itself a sovereign nation and made the declaration stick. But now it was natural to hope Fireball would carry the day.

The distraction had broken up conversational groups. As they reformed, Kyra was surrounded by camaradas. A hectic merriment set in. Drink flowed, gushed, torrented. Rather than go out after food, her group settled for Rory’s monumental sandwiches. Eventually they got to singing, more and more the old spacer songs until—

“MacCannon was a Fireball man. That rambling rocketeer

Could lift off into orbit on a single keg of beer.

The whisky that he much preferred was made not for the meek.

Unless you were a Scot, a shot would ground you for a week.

“MacCannon was a macho man, a brawling, balling Celt.

For EVA he needed just a helmet and his pelt.

His lady friends expressed their love in moans and groans and pants,

And made remarks among themselves concerning elephants.

“Its clouds sulfuric acid high above the C0
₂
,

So hot and thick down underneath that lead itself would stew,

The atmosphere of Venus is as poisonously ripe

As the air became around us when MacCannon lit his pipe
.

“His ship once had an argument while passing through the void,

Alone, about the right of way, with one big asteroid.

Adrift, he used the time to make a large discovery,

The art of shooting craps to win in zero gravity
.

“The devil knocked upon the lock and said, ‘You’re due to die
.

Come down with me.’ MacCannon spat some whisky in his eye
.

The sizzle and reaction sent the devil with a yell

On a hyperbolic orbit that would take him back to hell.

“MacCannon then decided his disabled boat should boost.

He ate a mighty meal of beans and set himself to roost

Upon a mass ejector tube far sternward in his craft
,

And the ship went leaping forward from the thunders booming aft.

“’Round Jupiter he whipped so fast he had but minor woes;

The radiation only crisped the hair within his nose.

Approaching home, he showed us what his pilot skills were worth
,

Crash landing on an island off Antarctica of Earth
.

“Besieged by lustful penguins, nearly out of whisky too
,

He set to make a signal that would fetch a rescue crew.

Olympus Mons had never spewed more smoke up over Mars

Than the vileness puffing skyward from MacCannon’s damn cigars.—”

The ballad went on, gross, childish, and, for Kyra during a minute after she happened to glance at the man who had lost his career, forlornly defiant.

F
ROM
S
ALEM SHE
took a bus four hundred-odd kilometers east to Baker. She reached the town late on the third day of her escape, found a room in a small hotel and a meal nearby, and flopped out. The rides hadn’t been bad, but waiting in terminals between them had stretched her thin. How many plainclothes officers were posted?

Incessant newscasting about terrorists didn’t help. The country was being roiled into a vigilante mood. The government might no longer be popular, but anything was preferable to bombs in control centers or destructive nanotech.

“The essential minimum of truth,” Guthrie had remarked. “‘Chaotic’ is a broad cussword. It covers the few maniacs who do exist, along with everybody else who seriously wants to be rid of the Avantists. Not that we’ll try to contact the sane, more or less organized ones. Those who’re smart and lucky have made themselves unfindable. What I’m hoping for—well, pseudo-me knows about it and has surely tipped the Sepo, but I think their main attention will be on more obvious possibilities, like a Fireball consorte having stashed me someplace. That’s a gigalot of people and places to check out. Meanwhile, those I have in mind, they have resources.”

In the morning, feeling considerably better, Kyra left him enclosed by her bag, wrapped in her garments, and set forth. The hotel was antiquated; a live worker would clean the room and make the bed. Perforce she assumed that person wouldn’t snoop. She dared not put the bag in safe deposit. Each broadcast she’d seen told the public to be on the lookout for infernally clever devices and report whatever might be suspicious, or just unusual, to the police.

Outside, the air was already warming in the hot dry summer that reigned east of the Cascades. The buildings, old and mostly low, reminded her, in their very different style, of Novgorod; but here was more activity, more life.

Though traffic was not so dense that cars and trucks were banned on any streets, it bustled. Most vehicles bore the Homesteader emblem, a green field on which a medieval-looking plow was silhouetted against a rising sun. Most riders and pedestrians wore unostentatious clothes of good material. They seemed more relaxed and cheerful, on the whole, than the average North American. Her informant obtained municipal bus routes for her, and she caught one to the outskirts of town.

The hinterland rolled away in crops, pastures, orchards. Their cultivation was not robotic; she spied individuals on tractors. Houses and their outbuildings lay two or three kilometers apart. Northward rose an industrial park, not large but its sleek modernity a contrast to the farms. At its distance she couldn’t make out what flag flew above it; however, since it was clearly not the Union’s, she’d bet it was the Homesteaders’.

They were, she’d heard, the society least separate from the mainstream, the readiest to do business with non-members. That didn’t mean they were less desirous of maintaining economic and cultural independence, their special ideals and ways, than were, say, the Muslims. They likewise had their laws, governance, ranks, rites, initiations, mystique. If anything, Kyra thought, their lack of overt picturesqueness kept them freer than others from outside notice and interference.

She walked along a street to the address Guthrie had given her. Trees shaded the paving. Some houses perhaps went back a couple of centuries with their frame sides and deep porches. Lawns and flowerbeds surrounded them. The air was quiet and smelled sweet. Doubtless this wasn’t an exclusively Homesteader neighborhood, but it must be predominantly so, like the entire valley. The society’s chapters had expanded fast in regions where agriculture could feed the populace without needing fancy machinery and where self-help was a tradition not altogether extinct.