Harvest of Stars

by Poul Anderson

  She braced herself. She wasn’t doing anything illegal, yet. Her identicard showed she was a citizen, nominally.

  Scant comfort. A foreigner, arrested, would have more rights, more help to appeal for, than she would.

  The Sepo got off. Kyra let out a breath. For an instant, she leaned on the cuddler beside her. Nonconformers looked at each other and, bit by bit, resumed their conversations.

  The telltale flashed that she was approaching her destination. She crossed the strips, signalled jerkily, went through the door while it was still withdrawing, and caught the safety rail lest she stumble.

  Anger flared. This was nonsense! She was a spacecraft pilot, able to handle herself at anything from zero g to ten. She wasn’t aged or sick, she was twenty-eight years old and her genome promised her another century or so of robust health if she heeded her medical program. All right, she was on a job new to her, possibly hazardous, but that was no excuse for blinkiness. Get on with it, girl.

  Nobody else was in the corridor. She jogged through its pastels to the door marked 1567. The exercise warmed blood and spirit. Odds were that nothing waited for her, and that she’d return directly to the spaceport. She grinned. After this much fidgeting, what a letdown. She touched the bell plate.

  At the station she had used her informant to make a quick, anonymous audio call, verifying that Lee was at home. He ought to be; these rooms were his main workplace as well as his quarters. When she now got no response, misgiving wakened again. Had he gone out? She dismissed the emotion. Doubtless he wanted to scan her first. It was a natural precaution under the circumstances. She straightened, shaped a smile, and hoped he enjoyed the view.

  Men had told her she was handsome. She agreed, without letting it go to her head. Tall, broad-shouldered for a woman, otherwise slender but well outfitted fore and aft, she cut her sandy hair in a Dutch bob to frame hazel eyes, prominent cheekbones, straight nose, full mouth. When she spoke, her voice was a bit husky. “Saludos, consorte. I’m Fireball too, my name is Kyra Davis, and I’ve got urgent company business.”

  The door slid aside. “Come in,” Lee said. He saw the surprise she failed to hide, and the strained tone yielded to a chuckle. “I reckon you haven’t seen a picture of me. With a name like mine—and as a matter of fact, my folks live in Roanoke, where I was born. But Lee is a good old Chinese name.”

  He was short, slim, clad with the carelessness of a bachelor who need not keep up appearances at work. His features were boyish, though Kyra didn’t believe a professional intuitionist could be much younger than she. As she entered, nervousness resurged and made him talk on, pointlessly: “The family’s been over here for a couple of hundred years, genes were getting pretty diluted, but when the refugees arrived in Jihad times, some were ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia and three or four of them married into my lineage. Since then, bueno, you know how people tend to stick close to those they know and can trust—endogamy’s gotten common—”

  He stopped and swallowed. Kyra sympathized. “’Fraid you might have said too much?” she answered. “Don’t worry, I’m not a psychomonitor, not any kind of police. I’m Fireball, I told you. Here, let me prove it.” From a coat pocket she drew her card case, to offer him the company ident that stood for so much more than any government issue.

  “Yes, gracias,” he mumbled. “Excuse me. I’ve got to—Excuse me. No offense meant, but … if you’d follow me, por favor?” He led her toward an inner door.

  On the way she observed her surroundings. This living room was unpretentiously furnished, cluttered with souvenirs, keepsakes, a chessboard, a bookcase holding codices that could well be heirlooms. Pictures on the walls, not activated at the moment, were probably of kinfolk and the hills of his homeland. A large viewscreen gave an outlook from the topmost spire, just below the theta. That scene was heartcatching. The integrate became a geometrical wilderness of pinnacles and green biospaces, glimmering away on every hand till it lost itself in the hazy air, as fantastic as anything at Luna or L-5. Westward she spied the giant leap of waters in Niagara Park and, dim beyond them, certain towers she remembered. North and south she made out the lakes, dull silvery sheenings in the mist. She decided she liked Robert E. Lee.

  The next room was cramful of equipment. It included three big multiceivers, as many different computer terminals, and a vivifer that must be for full-sensory input, not entertainment. A molecular scanner quickly verified that her ident was genuine and had not been tampered with. The informant on his wrist was a fancy one indeed; maybe the company had supplied it, considering what it must have cost. It checked not only her thumbs but her retinae, and confirmed that the patterns matched those in the card.

  Lee smiled apologetically. “This was required, you understand,” he said. “We scarcely need to take a DNA sample! Now, uh, consorte Davis, what can I do for you?”

  Kyra’s heart lurched. She must gulp before she could utter the question. “Do you have Guthrie?”

  He stared. “Huh?”

  “Anson Guthrie. The jefe. Are you hiding him?”

  “Why—uh—”

  “Listen. I’ve proven myself to you, but if I have to go further, muy bien.” The story tumbled from her. “Washington Packer sent me. You know who he is? Director of Kamehameha Spaceport. He called several of us into his office earlier today. He told us Guthrie’s been in the Union since shortly after the government occupied Fireball’s North American headquarters. He was smuggled in and squirreled away so he could be on hand to mastermind our strategy on the spot. It wasn’t really a gyroceph thing to do, Packer said. We needed to react fast and decisively. International communications are too likely tapped, but we have secure lines inside the country.

  “Packer had just gotten word. He didn’t say where from, but prob’ly it was a mole in the Security Police. Whether a Chaotic or an agent of ours, I don’t know. The government’s planning a second stage of crackdown on us. Within the next two or three days, they’ll take over everything. And it seems they’ve learned the jefe is on hand. They have a list of half a dozen places where he may very well be.

  “Packer was able to retrieve that list from our cryptofile. Of course, he’d been careful not to know, himself, where Guthrie was hiding. His information didn’t include how to access safe lines to those places, so he dared not phone them. The best he could do was send one of us to each.

  “Us—I mean, we were that number of persons out of those who happened to be on hand. I’m a pilot myself. We were also ones he figured he could rely on, and who could leave the port without it seeming particularly suspicious to the watchers outside, and soon return looking just as natural. Whoever finds Guthrie is to carry him back, so he can be put in a spacecraft and sent out of reach before the Avantists are there to stop it.

  “Bueno, is he here?”

  Kyra stopped, out of breath, faintly dizzy. Had she really needed to go on at such length?

  Lee’s gaze stabbed at her. “God damn,” he murmured, “you are genuine.” And: “Yes. This way.”

  The words hit like a thunderclap. Then suddenly she was altogether alert and cool. It felt as if a singing went through her bones, but every sense was opened full, the universe grew supernaturally vivid, while her mind sprang. Thus had she felt before when her life came to depend on nothing but herself, once in a boat wreck on a surf-swept Pacific reef, more than once in space.

  Lee brought her to another room, where he had his bed, a closet and dresser, a desk and some hobby material. He played with model aircraft, she saw. A half-finished historical piece, skeletal biplane, wistful centuries-old memory of days when humans flew in machines they could build with their hands, effused a tang of glue. A viewscreen was tuned to a nature reserve—the North Woods, Kyra guessed fleetingly, for the well-ordered, well-tended trees were conifers, and canoes glided over the water behind them. Only a few people were in sight, but background noise indicated a campsite was close by. Not that a campsite was ever far away, in any such area.

  The
irrelevancy evaporated. Lee was saying: “He stays out of the circuits except when he’s in contact with his officers. Those lines are tap-proof, we hope, but why take unnecessary chances? Otherwise he’s in a hidden, shielded safe. He had it installed by the first agent of his who rented this apartment, which was decades ago, I reckon. He can look out, listen, call me by voice, and of course I can provide him with whatever material he wants for information or pasatiempo.”

  Curiosity flickered in Kyra. What did Guthrie enjoy hearing, reading, watching, vivifying, after more than a hundred years as a wraith in a box? His personal style kept the earthiness recorded during his mortal existence, but maybe that was a fake, a public relations ploy. …

  Lee halted before a flatscreen. Like those in the living room, the image it projected was not in motion. Full face, a man’s head and shoulders—that haircut and high-collared tunic went out of style generations ago, the subject must be somebody Guthrie had liked or admired or—Wait! She’d seen him in a history show, hadn’t she? Mamoru Tamura, the mayor who guided L-5 through its first great crisis—

  Lee saluted. “Emergency, sir.” Now that action was upon him, he had lost his own hesitancies. “Pilot Kyra Davis brings news from Director Packer. The government’s preparing a raid. We’d better get you out of here.”

  “Judas priest!” exploded a rough basso. “Move!”

  Lee touched the ornate frame at certain points. The entire unit swung aside. Was it a dummy? Had Guthrie watched through the portrait’s eyes, heard with its ears, as he almost seemed to speak with its lips? The space behind held an object. Lee reached in, detached it from a portable terminal, and brought it forth.

  “You take him, consorte,” he said. “Explain the situation while I get a bag or something to carry him in.”

  Kyra held out her hands. The weight that descended into them was oddly little, two or three kilos. Shouldn’t the founder and captain of Fireball mass more? His undertakings ranged from end to end of the Solar System and on toward the stars. The person, the mind that had been copied into this program, it had itself—no, he had himself—fared the whole way to Alpha of the Centaur and back. Surely there must be more to him than this.

  But no. A human brain held less material.

  And ghost-Guthrie required no complete brain. A neural network equivalent to a cerebral cortex. Sensory centers capable of handling electronic, magnetic, photonic inputs. Motor centers capable of outputs into control devices. A memory unit. Software encoding what he was. Maybe a bit more than that. Kyra didn’t know; psychonetics wasn’t her field. But not much more, surely. Otherwise, the rest of what she held was instrumentation, minimal auxiliary apparatus, a battery, a case.

  The whole of what she held was her liege lord. They had never before met, but he it was to whom she had ultimately given her troth, and who had given her Fireball’s.

  “Sir,” she whispered. “Sir.”

  She had seen the case depicted and described, and others like it. (How very few like it.) Yet to confront, to grasp the presence was as overwhelming as had been her first encounters with love and death.

  The sheer simplicity became incomprehensible. This was just a box of dark blue organometal, hard, glassy smooth, edges rounded off, seams nearly invisible. Its flat bottom was about twenty by thirty centimeters, with five-millimeter discs set flush to protect several connectors. It rose about another twenty centimeters to a curved top. Two more discs on either side marked additional connectors. Between each pair a larger circle, four centimeters across, covered the diaphragm that served as an ear. A similar one on the front surface was for the speaker. On that same face—so must she think of it—were two hemispheres, the diameter of the audio caps.

  The volume was approximately the same as for a large human head. Anson Guthrie’s? He had been a big man.

  The hemispherical shells split and drew back, like eyelids. Two flexible stalks, five or six millimeters thick, emerged. Their ends bulged out in knobs about three centimeters wide. With snakish deliberation they extruded themselves to their full fifteen centimeters and twisted in her direction. From within the knobs, lenses gleamed at her.

  “Hey, don’t drop me, girl,” boomed the voice. “Put me down and pick your jaw up off the floor.”

  Could a man make jokes after he was dead? Bueno, Guthrie often did, unless that was a calculated pretense. But now, with the hunt on his track? Most carefully, Kyra lowered him to the desk beside the model airplane.

  “Okay, brief me,” Guthrie ordered. The synthesized sounds, which could have come from a living throat, bore an accent. She had heard that it was American English as spoken in his youth, and knew he was apt to use expressions from that era.

  She rallied her wits and repeated what she had told Lee.

  Guthrie shaped a whistle. “Sanamabiche! How the devil—? Yes, we’d better up anchor right away. Good man, Wash. Good lass, you. I won’t forget.”

  Lee brought in a daypack. “Will this do?” he asked. Kyra frowned, uncertain. “It won’t draw attention,” he said. “You see them everywhere these days. They leave both hands free.”

  She nodded. “Muy bien.”

  “You mean you didn’t have something of your own, Davis?” Guthrie growled. “No forethought?”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she replied, stung while acknowledging that the criticism was fair. “We were terribly rushed.”

  “And you and Wash and the rest aren’t schooled in skullduggery. Sure, I understand. Take me and stuff me,” which sounded obscurely like another jape, “and we’ll be off.” The lenses swung toward Lee. “You sit tight. When the cops bust in, be surprised. You don’t know nothin’. Nobody been here but us chickens. Can you do that? They’ll interrogate you, which’ll be no fun, but I don’t expect they’ll deep-quiz, if you give them no cause to suspect you. Are you game?”

  Lee stood straight. “Yes, sir.”

  “You can run and try to hide if you’d rather. I don’t think it’s a good idea, though. That’ll show them you probably are involved, and they’ll be on your trail with every high-tech sort of bloodhound they’ve got. Chances are they’ll catch you pretty quick. You’re marked, known, registered, identified, forty ways from Sunday, you being a resident citizen of this great free republic. As a member of Fireball, you must have a lot of extra data in your dossier, too. When they’ve run you down, they will squeeze your information out of you, and worry about Fireball’s wrath later. That won’t be nice at all.”

  Indeed it wouldn’t be, Kyra thought. Not torture; that could bring trouble with the World Federation, and wasn’t guaranteed effective anyway. Rehabilitative medical care. Chemicals and phased electropulses opened up a mind as a man peels an orange. They often left it in a very similar condition.

  “I truly believe your best bet is to stay put and play dumb,” Guthrie finished.

  Lee nodded, a spastic jerk. “Yes, sir.”

  Guthrie’s tone gentled. “I’m sorry, Bob. Sorrier than I can say. The one solitary excuse I’ve got for skiting off and leaving you is that a lot of people are at hazard.”

  And a lot of hopes, Kyra thought.

  “I understand,” Lee said, thinly but steadily. “If anybody can balance this skewed-up equation, it’s you. Go.”

  The phone chimed. He turned toward the room’s outlet.

  “Hold,” Guthrie rapped.

  “What?” Lee asked. The phone chimed again.

  “Don’t answer.” A lens cocked itself at Kyra. “Davis, how did you know Bob was at home? You wouldn’t have wanted to hang around waiting for him and getting noticed.”

  “I, I called,” Kyra said. “Public booth. When he responded, I broke off.”

  “I supposed it was a miscall,” Lee added. The phone chimed. “They happen. I didn’t think any more about it.” The phone chimed.

  “That could be a Sepo scout.” Guthrie declared starkly. “They’re mighty quick off the mark when they want to be.”

  “Packer said—the mole said—in two or
three days,” Kyra stammered.

  “That’s what the mole said, whoever he is. How long did it take him to get to someplace where he could halfway safely pass on what he’d learned? How precise was it? Did the main office meanwhile decide to advance the schedule?”

  Kyra recalled the officer who boarded the fahrweg. As far as she knew, even nowadays uniformed Security Police weren’t too common a sight anywhere. (Plainclothesmen might be something else.) Had he been on a different assignment, or was he a forerunner?

  “They like to case the territory and stake it out good before they make a pinch,” Guthrie went on. “Let’s have a quick reconnaissance of our own. Bob, your big screen can sweep the area.”

  The phone fell silent. Lee moved to play whatever message was perhaps being recorded. “Halt!” Guthrie commanded. “They’ll have meters to show you’re doing that, if it is them.”

  Lee yanked his hand back. “Right,” he gasped. “I forgot. Yes, you are the jefe.” A world of meaning pulsed in that informal word. He took the case and bore it into the living room. Kyra followed.

  They stared at the sky view from the spire. Something glinted high overhead. Lee set Guthrie on a table and operated the controls. Vision sprang upward, magnified, amplified. A lean teardrop poised, black and white, on its jets. Kyra estimated its altitude as three kilometers. From that distance, with optics less capable than what she routinely used in her spacecraft, you could count ants on the pavement below. She sensed her sweat, acrid and chill.

  “Yeah, Sepo,” Guthrie said. “You didn’t get here any too soon, Davis.”

  “What can we do?” she heard herself ask.

  “Let me think. I’ve studied those cochinos over the years, and I remember others like them in the past, around the globe. Maybe you could still walk out with me and ride off, unmolested. I wouldn’t bet on it, though. Chances are, they’ve already got the gateways watched. By men in civilian dress, naturally.”