Harvest of Stars - [Harvest of Stars 01]

by Poul Anderson

  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. The 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 Guthrie-san, 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 acknowledged 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, streamlined, 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.

  The corridor opened on Yukawa Square. Walls rose thirty meters, making room for trees in a park. Leaves of birch danced to a draft from unseen ventilators. Creeping juniper lined the gravel paths over the grass, among a few carefully placed meteoroids. Flowers surrounded a Buddha. Several children romped about, their laughter high and sweet. Across the walkway on the far side Eiko saw an ornate facade, the Chinese opera.

  It seemed grotesque that she walked in danger through this beloved familiarity. She hastened her steps.

  The fahrweg she wanted had a door halfway down Moreno Passage. Ten persons waited. “Tamura!” exclaimed Chatichai Suwanprasit. “Where have you been? I have tried and tried to call.”

  Eiko quashed alarm. She couldn’t realistically have hoped to escape seeing everyone she knew. “I was busy,” she mumbled.

  The door opened. Passengers got out. Upbound people went in. The door shut. The radial platform thrust against footsoles.

  “It is terrible, what they have done,” Suwanprasit was saying furiously. “Can I do anything for you?”

  “Thank you, but I think we had better wait,” Eiko replied. “The . . . detainees ... are not mistreated.”

  “But this—our own company—” Despair contorted the round face.

  “We shall see.”

  “Where are you bound, if I may ask? If you would like to talk with someone, my wife and I—”

  “Thank you. Perhaps later.” Eiko recalled the story she had constructed. “I wish a quiet while, solitude. Do you understand?”

  The bionicist nodded. He took her hand for an instant before he got off.

  That was at the level where he worked. The fahrweg had already made two stops. Those were in residential sections. Now it crossed different territory. It slowed, that bodies might accommodate to lessening weight. Though air pressure did not change much, Eiko’s eardrums popped. She felt the lightness more keenly than ever before; but then, all her senses were tuned high. At the next stops the door opened on cavernous reaches, machines, nanotanks, once on cropland and an orchard. L-5 produced wares for export, especially those that required low gravity or none in the making, but it also mostly fed and clothed itself. Were it cut off from trade with Earth it could soon be turning out everything it needed, deploying solar megamirrors for energy and obtaining raw materials from space.

  That fact gave courage, irrelevant though it be in the immediate situation. She would not let herself consider how vulnerable to attack the colony was.

  She left the fahrweg last, halfway to the center. Since the invasion, few had cared to visit the park that occupied most of this deck. They stayed close to home in case events exploded. She had noticed and made it part of her scheme.

  The wall at her back, she set forth on a trail. At half Earth weight, she moved as easily as the butterflies. The air was thin but she needed less and it was mild and moist, full of living odors. Bougainvillea and poinsettia flared, fantastically tall. A stand of bamboo clicked in the forced breeze. Birds trilled in a plum grove. She crossed a bridge high-arched over a brook that rushed from a hillside, pumped, artificial, but clear and songful. Mostly the terrain was grass and wildflowers. It curved upward before her to meet the illusion of sky.

  Another wall hove in view. Its mural showed a classic landscape, cone-shaped mountains above a river and village. A torii arch gave ornament to the gate through it.

  On the far side Eiko came to the Tree.

  The Tree. Here the air lay hushed. Light fell in beams or like a mist down into shadow, to speckle a floor of yielding duff, clustered ferns, logs that were fallen, limbs overgrown with moss and mushrooms. Her gaze found no more sky. This space was deckless almost to the spin axis, a shaft half a kilometer across and nearly as deep. In it reigned the Tree.

  Sequoia, biological experiment, genes cunningly mutated, growth hastened by chemistry and allowed b
y weight that dwindled as the crown rose—words. It was like calling Bach’s Passion According to St. John a set of notes scribbled around an account of a myth. She entered into holiness.

  Often had she sought here, climbed, rested in the heights, meditated or daydreamed or simply been. Once beyond the lower branches she rarely encountered anyone else. To go higher was reasonably safe if you took care, but a single time sufficed most of those who ever made the effort. Diversions elsewhere—winged flight, a globular pool at the axis, variable-g sports and dancing, excursions outside, and more and more—had variety in them. Here were only infinite enigmatic traceries of bark, boughs, needles, wind, cloud. Sometimes a bird or a darting squirrel went by.

  She approached. The trunk was a wall, a tower, a fortress, red-brown and rough to see, warm and soft to touch. She rounded its immensity and found the ladder. They who fastened the metal had worked in reverence. It was colored like the bark; rungs and bars and resting stages seemed to belong as much did the lesser plants in the twilight below. Eiko laid hold.