Harvest of Stars

by Poul Anderson

  The whole thing had seemed so cleanly scientific. Given the theoretical knowledge and the technological capability, you could download a personality, map it into the software of a neural network which itself mapped the unique brain that bore the personality. True, the process was slow, complex, expensive, imperfect. It performed no clean, swift scan, but instead a pervasion, the special molecules in their legions, brought by bloodstream and cerebrospinal fluid to conduct their cell-by-cell examinations while the subject lay half-conscious under electrophasing. Then came resonances with external fields, to recover the data. Then a battery of hypercomputers to interpret and order the findings. Meanwhile, treatment to rid the subject of his tiny inquisitors and bring him back to normal. Design, test, redesign, retest. Eventually, the program, the download—approximation, sketch, ghost of his mind. It had his memories, with the inclinations, beliefs, prejudices, hopes, outlook, style of thinking, entire awareness. But it was not the flesh-and-blood person. It ought to be as comprehensible as any other artifact. It ought to be as controllable.

  The stories of all downloads declared that it wasn’t.

  How controllable, ultimately, was anything?

  Sayre quelled a shudder. He told himself he was over-tired, overwrought. Discipline returned, and he spoke levelly. “See here, I’m making one final effort to be friendly. Have you enough knowledge to appreciate that? You were oblivious a long time, and the updates you have since received were audiovisual only. I wonder if you realize what a concession this visit of mine is.”

  “I know you’re the head of the Security Police, and therefore ex officio a member of the Advisory Synod, which quietly tells the legislature what laws to pass, the judiciary what decisions to reach, and the executive what to do.” Guthrie sounded unimpressed. “I also know you’re nothing special in history. It’s had your sort again and again, like outbreaks of acne.”

  Sayre couldn’t hold down a flick of anger. He flushed. “You betray your ignorance,” he snapped. “Unique, decisive, irreversible events do happen. Fire. Agriculture. The scientific method. Xuan Zhing and his system.”

  “I’ve heard that one before, too.”

  “You have not! Who else properly analyzed the dynamics of social action? Science, not witch doctors or folk remedies, science put an end to smallpox, AIDS, heart disease, cancer. Do you imagine anything but science can put an end to injustice, wastefulness, alienation, violence, all the horrors humans make for themselves? If you had troubled to study Xuan’s mathematics—”

  Sayre broke off. It was ridiculous, preaching like this at a program in a box. Yes, he certainly needed some rest and recreation.

  Yet the concept caught him as often before, uplifted him, refreshed and recharged his spirit. Not that he claimed personally to have seen or grasped every facet of the vast achievement. Few intellects reached that high. Even Xuan, throughout the decades of his labors, had drawn heavily on the computer resources of the Academic Internet, as well as acknowledging his debt to earlier thinkers. The likes of Sayre must depend on what they were taught in school, with lectures and semipopular writings to deepen it somewhat afterward. Nevertheless he could appreciate the fittingness of it all—the same processes shown to have been at work in Han Dynasty China and Imperial Rome, in Islam and Cao-Dai, in chronometry and calculus. He could be convinced by its arguments that, given modern information processing, the market economy was obsolete, with its inefficiencies and inequities. He could be inspired by the prospect of establishing and maintaining conditions so well planned that society must evolve toward a sane order of things, as a spacecraft launched on the right trajectory must pass among the multitudinously changeable forces upon it to the desired destination.

  Fleetingly, not for the first time, he knew that what made and kept him a dedicated Avantist was none of these proven propositions, not really. It was a logical non sequitur—a vision, if you will—and therefore nonrational. But Xuan’s scheme allowed for nonrationality, irrationality, and the chaos of nonlinear systems. They were powerful elements in the course of events; his reasoning took them fully into account. What had captured Sayre’s imagination was Xuan’s afterword. The thinker was at last simply speculating, the prophet was no longer prophesying but imagining. He agreed that nobody alive in an imperfect and limited present can foresee what will happen in a future that has approached perfection and abolished limitations. Still, one dared look ahead, and in fact there had been those already in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who did. They saw dimly, Xuan more clearly, the Transfiguration—a thousand years hence, a million?—and it in its turn might be only a beginning—the whole cosmos evolving from blind matter to pure intelligence—

  A surprise jolted Sayre back into Guthrie’s hereness. “I did study the math,” he heard the download reply. That had not been said earlier, no matter how intensive the interrogation. “After all, as a doctrine it was acquiring more true believers every day. Your Avantist Association was becoming a political force to reckon with, uh-huh. Though mainly because of the half-believers, the hordes who supposed the scheme must have something going for it because everybody said it was objective and scientific, didn’t they? I’d better check it out for myself. So I got a logician to help me, and we waded through the psycho-tensor matrices, the lao-hu operator, the quantitative studies, enough of the whole schmeer to give me a pretty fair notion, before I decided my time was worth more than this.”

  “Which proves you learned nothing,” Sayre retorted. “Did you never ask yourself why those ideas appealed to so many?”

  “Sure I did, and came up with the usual reasons. Oh, yes, the world was in a bad way, in the wake of the Renewal and the Jihad and the other hydrophobias it’d been through. This country wasn’t the worst off, but it had better days to remember than most did, which made its people feel like they’d fallen further and harder. Xuan had made some predictions that were more or less right and issued some prescriptions that weren’t totally absurd. North Americans always have been suckers for salvationism. Enough of them swallowed Xuanism—or, I should say, its sound-bite slogans—that your gang got itself elected, never mind how. The last halfway free election the country had.”

  “Nonsense. The public saw what was being accomplished.”

  “Some positive things, yeah. Mostly of the flashy sort, tenements, reclamation, universal genetic counseling, et cetera, et cetera. Nothing I couldn’t have thought of myself, with common sense and experience of people.”

  “Untrue. You might as well claim that Einstein thought of nothing you could not have yourself.”

  “Different case entirely. General relativity was new. It explained a good-sized chunk of reality. At bottom, under the fancy language and equations, Xuanism is the same collectivist quackery that’s been peddled these past two or three thousand years, over and over and over. Longer than that, I’ll bet.”

  “No. For the first time, we have a theory that explains the facts of history.”

  “Some of the facts. Astrology or a flat Earth explain some of the facts too. The rest of Xuanism is just about as useful as they are. Or as disastrous, rather. Exactly how well has the Union done under its Avantist government? Where have all your restructurings and redistributions and reorientations brought you, except deeper into the swamp? Somebody said once that a fanatic is a man who, when he’s lost sight of his purpose, redoubles his efforts.

  And your purpose was never scientific anyway. It was religious. Crank religious. Why, your power elite don’t call themselves a board or a council but a synod. Interesting connotations, hey? As for your pipe dream of a world-intelligence that’ll eventually embrace the whole universe—”

  “Bastante!” Sayre exclaimed. “I didn’t come here to listen to your nescient ranting.”

  “No, you’re an intellectual,” Guthrie gibed. “You believe in the free exchange of ideas.”

  “Among minds capable of it, minds that have learned sanity.”

  “Yeah, I reckon I am an anti-intellectual. Alw
ays have been. Listen. I was born in 1970, when the young intellectuals were rampaging over the college campuses. They admired Mao and Castro, the way the earlier generation of them had admired Stalin. They went on to become tenured faculty, and I was glad to drop out of school. Their successors bred the Renewal and cheered it into power, because it was going to save the environment and purify society. But you are different Sure.”

  Sayre took three long breaths. Slowly, his hands stopped trembling. “Are you absolutely sealed in the past? I came to give you one last opportunity. Don’t make it impossible for me.”

  “Why, what’d you like to do?”

  “Preserve you. We need your hardware, custom-made as it is, but in due course we can have another unit made for you. I have thought we might then talk. Not necessarily dispute; converse. You have been through so much, you are such a large part of history yourself. My colleagues and I—scholars, scientists—would be very interested.” Sayre paused. “You might also be. So I’ve hoped.”

  “When my past self was young,” Guthrie replied, “he’d argue with true believers in assorted glorious causes. Gradually he found out that at the core, fanatics are all alike. Sayre, you’re a bore. You’re a busybody too, and more than a bit of a sadist, but mainly you’re a bore. Spare me.”

  The man struggled with indignation and managed to keep his voice steady. “Have you given the slightest consideration to what will happen to you if you continue in this attitude? First, disconnection.”

  “What, again?” asked sarcasm.

  “Bueno, of course we have to do that in any case. We need your hardware for the newest replacement we’ve developed. If it works properly, and my techs think that this time it will, then it will continue in your network. But as I said, eventually we can make a new one for you, and you’ll waken again. That’s if you’ll give me reason to expect at least a minimum of cooperativeness from you. Otherwise, I’m afraid you’ll be too great a potential danger. With regret, I’ll have to order your discs wiped.”

  Guthrie was silent.

  “Oblivion,” Sayre told him. “Nonexistence. As if you never had been.”

  “No different from what’s always waited for everybody.” Guthrie sounded cool. Had he been linked to an imaging computer, the picture would likely have shrugged. “Unless there is something after death. I doubt that very much, but if there is, I suppose I’ll get a share of it.”

  It really would be too bad, having to destroy this fascinating relic. Maybe he could be frightened into reasonableness. “Or we can use you as experimental material,” Sayre warned.

  “You’ve been doing that to a succession of copies you’ve made of me.” Did this Guthrie feel pity and terror on their behalf? If so, he concealed it well. “I don’t see any point for you in torturing one more. Except revenge. Or plain old fun. Aren’t Xuan’s apostles above such emotions?”

  The damned, perverse diehard was right. The work already done would be amply difficult to keep secret, involving as it did a number of specialists. Unless the need for secrecy came someday to an end, anything else that was unnecessary multiplied the risk. If word got out, not only would an operation of turning-point possibilities be compromised, the Chaotics would make it part of their propaganda. (“See, the government isn’t content with what it does to ordinary human detainees in the correction centers—”)

  Sayre sighed. “Termination, then. We’ll keep you until we are sure of the new model, but I do not think you will ever rouse from this switchoff. I’m sorry.”

  That was no longer quite true.

  “My last words,” Guthrie said, “are, up yours.”

  Sayre blinked. What did that mean? No, he would not give his prisoner the satisfaction of asking.

  Eyestalks retreated. Guthrie had withdrawn.

  Sayre resisted the temptation to scream him back to attention. Instead, the man went to the phone. “You will make the conversion, Yoshikawa,” he directed.

  The team appeared within two minutes, bearing their apparatus. Sayre stood aside and watched. The task was simple, this part of it.

  Yoshikawa unscrewed a covering disc and touched the switch beneath. Noiselessly, Guthrie ceased to function. Deft hands opened the case, removed the discs, and set them aside.

  Sayre regarded them pensively. The flickering, flowing web of exchanges—electrons, holes, photons, fields—that was thought had died away. Frozen within the configurations of atoms were those patterns which recorded memories, habits, inclinations, instincts, reflexes, everything that had operated in the forebrain of living Anson Guthrie, together with some indeterminate fraction of its ancient nonhuman inheritance; and everything that ghost-Guthrie underwent after the transfer until the making of this copy; and everything that afterward passed through the copy’s own sensors and cerebrations.

  Such were the program and database, those several thick discs which had been placed in a rack on the table. The hardware was an analogue of the long-disintegrated brain itself, the inborn potentialities, the capabilities it had gained and the losses it had suffered through a turbulent lifetime. No other software was compatible with this. Every download, of the few that ever existed, had been as unique in every way as its mortal prototype.

  But organisms could be modified. So, by different methods, direct rewriting and superimposed sequences, could programs be.

  Yoshikawa inserted the new discs. For a while she and her team worked with instruments they connected to the case. Sayre shivered, waiting. Finally they conferred, removed the meters and scopes, closed the box. Yoshikawa switched the circuits back on.

  Eyestalks extruded. Sayre summoned total self-mastery. He trod forward to meet that gaze. Looming above, he said, “Guthrie.”

  “Y-yes.” The reply lagged. The lenses roved about before they steadied on him.

  Sayre smiled and spoke with great gentleness, as one did to correctees at certain stages of their reeducation. “Bienvenido, Anson Guthrie. Do you know what you are?”

  “Yes, I … do.” The words stumbled. “I’m not, not used to it—yet—”

  “That’s all right. To be expected. Take your time. Familiarize yourself. You’ll have all the help you want. Ask any questions you wish. Your memory will show that we are completely honest with you.”

  In the silence that followed, the ventilator seemed to whisper unnaturally loudly. “You seem to have been,” said the object at length. “I feel sort of confused, but I think it’ll straighten out.”

  “It will, I’m sure. Let’s make a little test. What are you?”

  “I’m a copy—of a copy—of a copy made from a live man—But you’ve given me new information!” Sudden strength rang forth. “I was wrong. I didn’t understand the situation, nor what Xuan was getting at, not really. I’ll have to think more about that, but—” The voice trailed off. After a minute: “Well, Sayre, my mind is changed. We’re allies. Thanks. I guess.”

  4

  A KNOCK SOUNDED. Lee and Kyra tucked Guthrie in the closet before they admitted the servant. He wheeled in a dinner cart, set the meal forth, salaamed, and left them. They brought their lord out and settled down to eat.

  Kyra discovered she was ravenous. Seasoned lamb, pilaf, eggplant, pita, cucumber salad dressed with yogurt, sweet side dishes, soured milk, fruit sherbet, coffee, all were prepared in ways strange to her but tasted supreme. Lee said it was traditional fare. These folk must have gone to considerable trouble and expense getting their nanotanks programmed for the ingredients. Maybe they bought some from an actual farm.

  Nourishment restored hopefulness and, for a while, kept exhaustion at bay. After the servant, summoned by a buzzer, had removed the debris, talk began to range freely, beyond matters of escape and comeback.

  Lee seemed to gain less animation than Kyra. When she remarked on it, he explained wryly, “This isn’t my kind of escapade. I’ve led a pretty quiet life.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “You’ve knocked around with lots of odd people, haven’t you? And gott
en familiar with ’em, too, which is more than I probably could.”

  “Bueno, my work demands that.”

  Yes, she thought, an intuitionist had to be a peculiar combination of intellect and sensitivity. S/he must possess a basic grasp not just of modern science and technology but of society; not just history, diagrammed structures, analyzed dynamics, but individual human beings; not just the High World but enough of the relatively backward cultures and subcultures that s/he could see—no, feel—something of their interactions with it. On that basis s/he was supposed to develop models and write programs, to generate ideas and make proposals that had a fair likelihood of being partially right. S/he might thus anticipate the results of some change, especially on the human level, and indicate ways to forestall or mitigate those that were undesirable.

  Guthrie had created the profession, Kyra remembered. He set in motion the first studies and experiments, then the first recruitments. Fireball gained so much thereby, even at that early stage, that other companies were quick to imitate, and finally governments did. She harked back to a lesson in school. As part of her education, she was to know about this, whether or not it ever impinged directly on her. Guthrie himself had recorded the lecture. He didn’t appear in the multi. A faceless box wouldn’t appeal to youngsters, and he reserved recreations of his mortal image for occasions more special. Artfully prepared scenes accompanied the homely voice.

  “The classic example from the past is the automobile. You’ve seen it in historicals, a live-piloted ground vehicle fuelled by hydrocarbons. It became practical and started taking over from the horse in a single generation. Well, any fool in those days could’ve seen that happening. A smart fellow could’ve predicted that this’d lead to a major industry. The subsidiary industries, like oil and highway work, would join in to make a combination that’d dominate the economies of whole nations. But I don’t believe anybody planned for oil reserves gaining vital strategic importance, till possession of them was suddenly one of the considerations that wars were being fought over. The explosion of suburbs and the dry rotting of inner cities, strangulated traffic, air not fit to breathe, all these caught people more or less by surprise. I’ll barely mention a revolution in sexual styles, to titillate you and make you want to study further on your own.