Harvest of Stars - [Harvest of Stars 01]

by Poul Anderson

  * * * *

  T

  he heath on the North Argolid highlands had not yet become forest, nor would for several hundred years—perhaps never, because folk might choose to keep these wide outlooks and open skies. But aspen and full-size birch now rustled in shaws strewn over ling, whins, and hardy grasses; willows arched above streams; evergreens had sent their vanguards as far as the southern horizon. Around Lifthrasir Tor, other trees stood alone or in small orchards amidst cultivated plots. Not all that grew there were like anything Earth had ever nourished. The geneticists were making what would hasten life’s conquest of Demeter, secure it, and provide for many human needs without recourse to machines. Some stalks formed intricate nets, some leaves were blue, and the breezes carried a wild sweetness in their warmth.

  Robot Guthrie strode up the hill from the airstrip. In his secondary hands he bore the case of download Kyra. They talked as they went, not by voice but by coded radio, a habit they had fallen into over the years. While they rarely had secrets to keep from the community, this gave them freedom to open themselves to one another.

  “Gorgeous day,” he said for conversation; she had talked little on their flight.

  “Hard to appreciate when I’m just a box,” she replied.

  “Yeah, sure, I’m sorry, but you insisted we spend no more time here than we must. Disconnecting you first from a body would take quite a bit.”

  “Yes, yes.” Kyra formed a sigh. “Give me all the sensors you’ve got, and it still isn’t like being alive in spring.”

  “No. Except—” Guthrie’s words trailed off.

  She finished them: “Except for what we’re going to, you claim. You’ve propagandized me enough about that. I’ve agreed at last, haven’t I? All right, let me find out for myself.”

  She spoke not peevishly but with the familiarity of a relationship older than most lifetime marriages and in some ways more intimate. Nevertheless he fell silent. The waves that pulsed between them carried an undertone of unvoiced meaning; they knew what they both remembered.

  * * * *

  So had they been in rapport that night. They were at opposite sides of Port Fireball, in the multiply-equipped control centers that served them for homes, but communication passed no less rapidly and fully. Outside, most of the town lay darkened. Most people were awake, though, beside their houses or in the riverside park or on the docks and roads along the bay. Phaethon was passing, its closest approach for the next century. A sharp naked eye could resolve the disc. Lambent white, its haste almost perceptible, it seemed to cast a chill through the lulling darkness.

  To the downloads it was merely a transient. Their concern was with a death more immediate.

  “You’re serious?” he cried.

  The answer came granite-hard. “I am.”

  “Terminating you—no, Kyra, no.”

  “Oh, you can simply switch me off if that leaves you happier. But the survival of the whole colony had better depend on me alone—a situation I can’t see ever arising—before anybody reactivates me. Otherwise I’ll terminate myself. I can do that any time, and will if I must, but I thought—” For an instant she hesitated. “—I thought we could say adios, Anson.”

  Had he been alive, he would have bowed his head and laid hand over eyes. “Are you that tired, or sad, or, or what? I never guessed.”

  “I never said.”

  “No, you wouldn’t have. A few remarks long ago didn’t seem to count any more. I supposed you’d gotten used to being what you are. What we are.”

  “I had. I am.”

  “But you’re not, uh, not resigned to it?”

  Her tone gentled. “ ‘Resigned’ is the wrong word. Would you apply it to yourself? I did my work, and it was interesting, often challenging. I’d get lost in it, I’d be it. But down underneath— How many like me are left? Gabriel Berecz and Pilar Cailly. You know as well as I do, they’ll bow out too within the next few years.”

  “I thought you were different, Kyra.”

  “I am. My original self is here. Not that we were ever close, but she’s a tie to life.”

  “A tie that could hurt, I’m afraid,” he murmured, “like scar tissue.”

  “Never mind that. Listen, I don’t intend to stop while she’s above ground, though that won’t be so very much longer. I suspect it would distress her, for no logical reason. I wouldn’t have mentioned this tonight except for the business you’ve raised. But I made the decision a while ago. The fact is, jefe, I’m in the same situation as the other downloads, and content to take the same road they did. You have no further need of my help. Not really. We’ve done the basic explorations. Air and transport system, the Rescue Corps, everything I’ve dealt with is running well. What more is left? I don’t propose to spend a millennium, or eternity, on routines that any bureaucrat or AI can handle.”

  “Space—” he implored.

  “Even in space, enough is enough. It was grand being a ship, ranging the planets. But I never could the way the real Kyra does and feels and is, because I am not her. Nor am I quite welcome yonder, you know. The Lunarians, especially, wonder whether I may, without intending to, be the forerunner of robots that could ease them out as it happened at Sol. So there too I’ve gone useless. Why linger?”

  “God damn it, I’d miss you!”

  The waves bore a caress. “Gracias, querido viejo. You’ve been a main part of why existence was worth doing. We were doing it together. But now I’ve used my share up.”

  “I haven’t. Wonder if I ever can.”

  She sent laughter. “You are what you are. I’m not your kind of conniving, bullying scoundrel.” Turning serious: “Understand, I am not despondent. I’m neither eager nor afraid to let go. I’m simply ready to. When the time comes, give me peace.”

  “You wouldn’t at least consider what Ben Franklin wished for? That after he was dead, somebody would rouse him every hundred years and tell him what’d happened?”

  “No. Too abstract. That’s basically why I want to leave, Anson. More and more, I feel how I myself am becoming an abstraction. A series of events, inside and outside this box, empty of meaning and blood.” With a hint of warmth: “No complaints. On the whole it was good, sometimes great. It was.”

  “It could be again, only much more so,” he told her.

  “How?” she asked flatly.

  “What touched your admission off was my saying I’ve got a new line of work for you.”

  “I was explaining why I don’t want it. Ask Gabe or Pilar.”

  “Neither is suitable. I’ve meshed with them, like their fellows before them, trying to talk them out of terminating, and I’ve learned the symptoms. They’re only staying on to wind up their duties, then that’s it. They’re resolved, because they’re . . . weary. I haven’t sensed that in you, Kyra.”

  “It hasn’t been my mood. In part, as I said, because of the presence of my living self. I’m looking past her death, and I do not propose to take on any new obligation that’ll hold me down.”

  “This is different from everything else. Wide open. And necessary. Judas priest,” Guthrie roared, “youare not done yet! I need you! I call on your troth!”

  Kyra was mute for a span that lengthened. Humans would have perceived it as short. Her response was wary. “No promises. What do you have in mind?”

  “Do you remember way back when, the first time I got into the bionet?” he began. “You were there.”

  “Yes. I offered to when it looked like maybe being risky, then declined to when it turned out not to be. I have ever since, in spite of your rhapsodies.”

  He sensed the slight lightening of her spirit and responded in kind. “Oh, come on. I haven’t burbled much about it, have I?”

  “No, usually you’ve spared me, once you got it through your database that I wasn’t interested.”

  “Uh, mainly that was because I haven’t had a lot to burble about. I’m actually in rather seldom, and never for long. Too flinking many other claims on my time.
Besides, frankly, it’s not a thing I do well. I think too much like a man, and this—it’s more a female thing. Rudbeck agrees. Gaia, Mother Earth, there was some truth in those old myths.”

  “What do you want from me? An opinion?”

  “More, unlimited more, Kyra. You seem to be only marginally aware of it, and it isn’t going on in obvious ways right under people’s noses, but—the ecological net, interlinks and communications, robots and computers, they aren’t doing so well either. Life’s taken root and expanded faster than we expected. It’s outrunning our controls and our helps, and crashing as a result. Not just on the frontiers, but in the established territories, we’re having more disasters all the time, environmental degradation, diseases, mass diebacks. Mostly that’s down around the bottom of the food chain, so it isn’t conspicuous to the untrained eye, but it means we can’t introduce higher species. In the long term, it means failure.

  “Everywhere, the ecology’s getting too big for us, too complicated, self-evolving, chaotic, no direction, no feedback. If we don’t take hold soon and guide things aright, children today will live to see the grass withering around their homes. What then was the point in coming to Demeter?”

  “M-m, I’ve had news about this, of course, but—”

  “It’s not easy to assemble the big picture. Rudbeck’s gang has, and they aren’t suppressing any information, but we’d rather not scream it from the housetops either. What we need is practical action by people who know what they’re doing, not hysteria. I recall the Renewal on Earth. I’d like to think our community is too select, or anyway too small, to run amok, but you never know. I’ve read about the Salem witchcraft panic.”

  “The what? Skip it. Where do I come in?”

  “We’ve got to get a mind into the system. Not a set of algorithms; a mind, which belongs to the whole and brings it together and makes it heal itself, the way—the way our minds did when we were alive, Kyra.”

  “An artificial intelligence,” she said fast. “I gather the sophotects on Earth can already outthink humans.”

  “Are they right for something as, as intuitive, as instinctive as this? Whether or not, we don’t dare wait till we’ve developed and built one and got it working properly. At our remove from the AI labs, that could take twenty or thirty years or worse. Meanwhile nature here would go to hell down a one-way chute.”

  “So you want a download to . . . fill in, be a stopgap, till you’ve got your superbrain.”

  “Correct. Though we don’t want. We desperately need.”

  “Why me? Are you sure Pilar is hopeless?”

  “I am. I hate that, I’m going to mourn for her as for all the rest, but I tell you, I know that extinction wish when I meet it. You don’t have it, not really, not yet.”

  “Nor do I have the qualifications you’re after.”

  “You’ll be linked into an almighty powerful system.”

  “If it isn’t equal to the task, what difference can I make?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody does. We’ll have to experiment, find our way forward as best we can, and maybe it’ll be for naught. But theory suggests a download, a consciousness, can be the catalyst. And my personal knowledge says that if any can, it’s you, Kyra, because you’re brave and simpatica and still, by God, every bit a woman.”

  She laughed afresh, louder. “And you’re an outrageous bullshit artist. Sweep a girl off her feet and onto her back before she’s guessed what you’re at.”

  “You will do it?”

  “I’ll give it a try. I suppose I owe Fireball that much.” Her tone softened. “And you, Anson.”

  * * * *

  Intensive work, such as was impossible on a global scale, kept the Lifthrasir neighborhood healthy. However, the building in the hilltop grove had not been greatly enlarged. Likewise the human staff; though Basil Rudbeck’s hair was white and his step slowed, he remained their director. It was the instrumentalities that had grown, in ways more artful and potent than size.

  “Bienvenidos,” he said. Smiling: “I feel I should offer you a chat in lieu of a cup of coffee, but no doubt you’d rather I proceed immediately with the grand tour.”

  “Must we?” asked Kyra. “Can’t I start directly on the job? I’ve done my homework.”

  “I think it would be best, señora, if you first got a physical exposure to the layout. You won’t be joined to a single computer-sensor-effector complex, you know. Here is where the integrations of subsystems around the planet—yes, and satellite monitors—come together.”

  “In other words, not just a brain, but organs, nerves, glands, blood cells, the works,” Guthrie said. “You’ll need acquaintance with . . . yourself.”

  “I know, I know,” Kyra replied. “I’ve been through all the simulations and— Sorry. Why am I so impatient? You’re right, there is no substitute for the real thing. Lead on, por favor.” As they took her around, her eyestalks swung to and fro, while questions rattled from her speaker.

  They brought her finally to the core. There, hands made connections, more through energies and inductions than wires; eyes dwelt on meters and displays, ears on auditory cues; voices gave guidance, piece by piece. This union was immensely more encompassing than when Guthrie first entered it.

  Yet she had for many years taken input from and given impulse to many different contrivances, on more worlds than this. She had often linked to other computers, to make their powers temporarily her own. To her the nonhuman was not foreign: she had been it. Today she learned fast. She would not at once become one, that would have taken long even were the means complete, but she began.

  Light fills the air, wind is aglow, drink of it, breathe of it, make leafing.

  Rainfall sows itself; it grows down through soil to the secret places where stones abide; it brings the strength of them up rootward.

  Lie still, molder away, then be again grass.

  Stems ripple to the running of a river.

  Cherish these boughs which cast shade.

  A storm flashes and clamors. Wings.

  When they took her out, “How are you? How’d it go?” Guthrie cried.

  “I can’t say,” Kyra answered as if in sleep. “Too strange. Give me time to know.”

  “You want time, then, time in the world?”

  “Yes, oh, yes.”

  * * * *

  56

  We have no plans for new missions beyond the Solar System. The probes to distant, astrophysically interesting objects will arrive centuries and millennia hence. It appears they will be superfluous; instrumental observation confirms every theoretical prediction. Theory shows, as well, how insignificant organic life must be in the universe, and allows the modeling of every possible form it could take. Few humans feel such discontents as drove you at Alpha Centauri to your ruinously costly exodus, and they are, in general, not persons who could succeed in any similar attempt. Rather, the best organic minds join increasingly with the sophotects in exploring and expanding the realm of intellect.

  * * * *

  A

  mong the Demetrians who came from Earth, many adapted to the rotation period by changing their circadian rhythm to a thirty-hour cycle, sleeping for a night and into the next forenoon, then wakeful for the rest of that day and the following night and day. Others, and nearly all children, lived straightforwardly by this their world. It might require a little help in the beginning, treatment to reset the biological clock, or it might not, but always it soon became natural.

  Hugh Davis woke shortly before sunrise. Dew gemmed the glade between blue-black battlemented walls of forest. A few drowsy chirps tinkled through the hush. Orange-red clouds limned branches and crowns to the east. Above them shone white Aphrodite, inward planet, morning star.

  He watched heaven brighten around it. His mother was somewhere yonder. May she be doing well, may she come home bearing more tales of mighty deeds. He wriggled from his sleeping bag and drew in a draught of air cool, moist, tinged with humus odors. The turf beneath his feet was we
t and elastic. The spring nearby gave a tang of iron when he drank. Radiance shouted through the woods as A stood up; a thousand hues of green surrounded him. No, he wouldn’t change with her.

  Stoking his banked fire, he squatted down and cooked breakfast. The bacon smells drove him deliciously loco. On a field trip every meal became a feast. Too bad he’d nobody to share it, preferably female. But as thin-spread as the ranger corps was, he couldn’t justify a partner in this comparatively safe area. If he did get into real trouble—by no means unheard of, when so much was unknown and unforeseeable—he’d call the Rescue Corps. If the trouble killed him, that was the chance he took, small enough price to pay for the life he led.