Harvest of Stars

by Poul Anderson

  “That fancy dinner we were talking about. Can we postpone it and just rustle up something at home? I’m not in the mood to go anywhere.”

  He peered at her through the dusk. “What are you in the mood for, then?”

  She laughed into his eyes. “As if you couldn’t guess!”

  They had been making love every chance they got. She didn’t let out that she had not renewed her prevention, that she wanted to bear his child beneath Alpha Centauri.

  48

  AS THE FLYER left ground, a flaw of wind struck and nearly sent it tumbling. The air hereabouts got tricky around vernal equinox. Maybe the companion sun, approaching periastron, added something to that, minute though its maximum input to this planet was. Sensors sped their data to download Kyra Davis. She saw the landing field and hangars wheel sideways, felt the roll and pitch, heard the gust boom and metal thrum. To elevate a fin and fire an auxiliary jet was not unlike the play of muscles when living Kyra rode a comber; for an instant the download remembered the taste of spindrift.

  The flyer corrected and sprang on skyward. She had enjoyed the small challenge. Being integral with a machine gave experience a fullness that control from outside it never quite matched.

  Even at fifteen hundred meters, where she leveled off, her condition had its advantages. Instruments measured a sultriness not much diminished; flesh would have gone hot and sticky. The ceiling was close above. That leaden overcast broke in the distant east, where A flung down beams that turned the Ionian Ocean molten. Nearer to shore the waves ran purple with a seasonal bloom of animalcules.

  Their hue was among the few things she would miss, if she survived long enough. The prediction was that they, like most native species, would go extinct as Terrestrial kinds spread into the seas. A couple of her fellows said they felt a bit guilty. Kyra declined to. Demeter would not simply be made fit for humans, it would bear such a wealth of life and beauty as it could never have brought forth of itself before its doom came upon it.

  As yet the starkness was little softened. The fuel plant on Hydrogen Island raised cooling towers in deceptively delicate filigree. Where the River Tanaus emptied into Shelter Bay, Port Fireball spread buildings clean of line and bright of colors. They housed industrial and scientific facilities. You must expand your productive capacity as fast as possible—a growth quasi-geometrical, machines breeding machines—if anything sustainable was to be there for the colonists when they arrived.

  Inward from the beach, moss patched boulders with green. Wind ruffled the grass and shrubs that encroached on the hills beyond. Mostly, however, Kyra saw bare rock, scoured by erosion, and glimmering, sterile rainwater pools. Had she possessed nostrils and lungs, the air would have been practically odorless save when thunderstorms sharpened it. Though breathable, it would have been stuffy, too much carbon dioxide, not enough oxygen.

  The flyer curved around and lined out westward.

  “Why do you not go higher and faster?” asked download Gabriel Berecz impatiently. Squatting aft among his robugs, today he wore a fieldwork body, caterpillar treads, telescoping sensors, multiple arms ending in a variety of hands.

  “I want to scan the territory,” Kyra replied. “Nobody’s been this way for some time. The surveyors that reported the trouble were traveling south from Illyria, you remember.” She and her passenger talked not by voice but by direct radio. They’d need to stay in contact at their destination.

  “What is to see except a lot of geology?” grumbled the ecologist.

  “You never know,” Kyra said. “We were far from having used up all the surprises in the Solar System when we left it.”

  Memories stirred. Occasionally they still brought unreasonable pain. She must train herself out of allowing that. Begin by concentrating on the desolation that was Argolis, streaming beneath her. A river, a canyon, a lake, a mountain, bare, dark, meaningless—how long till they had names? Those Classical tags that Earthside astronomers hung on the largest features, after maps appeared on their screens, might as well be catalogue numbers, devoid of history as they were. When would this air carry sounds with the infinite overtones that rang in “Devon,” “Dordogne,” “Dalmatia,” “Cape Horn,” “the Nile,” “Mount Everest,” “Jerusalem,” “Rome,” “Kamakura,” “Tours,” “Lepanto,” “Gettysburg”?

  Kyra pulled her attention back to the terrain.

  After about two hours she spied her goal ahead and slanted down toward it. Clouds had thickened overhead. A rainstorm made a wall of blue-black which hid the Mycenaean Range from her, but their foothills stood clear and steep. A stream coursed in cataracts out of them and through the valley beneath. There reeds shivered along its banks, bordering rows of brush and young willow. Land rolled away on either side startlingly bright green. At the fringes, robots trundled with their loads from a dome wherein humus was being synthesized, to work it into the rock that nanomachines had reduced to mineral grains.

  Here was one of the centers spotted around the globe for life to gain the vigor to spread onward of itself.

  “Where do you want to begin, Gabe?” Kyra asked.

  “Make a sweep low above the hills,” Berecz directed, connecting himself to the opticals. She descended and flew as slowly as was halfway safe. Thermals, crosswinds, air pockets buffeted her about and did their best to crash her. She lost herself in wrestling them. Once she thought fleetingly that this would never replace sex, but in its way it was fun.

  Of course, after the settlement had built a quivira, programs adaptable to a bodiless mind—No, she didn’t expect she’d ever go. Waking from it would be too high a price to pay. Let her stay what she was. She was getting better at it all the time.

  “There!” Berecz exclaimed. “Do you see?”

  Kyra linked to his instruments and acquired the view. A small mountain lifted with Chinese abruptness from the valley floor. Moss and tussocks were scattered across its lower slope. They were volunteers. Organic matter had drifted on breezes from below, rain had mingled it with lithosols milled by nature, spores and seeds followed—an early victory in the conquest for which these plants and their attendant microbes were gene-designed. In a hundred years or less this region should be ready for a forest.

  Death said otherwise. Magnifying, Kyra beheld stalks withered, turf gone brown, rivulets running thick with loam that roots had ceased to hold. The swathe broadened as it spread downward into the valley, a fan of dingy umber reaching four kilometers riverward. Widespread spots elsewhere showed how fast the blight was advancing. So far it wasn’t anything that a landsat could have identified through the nimbose atmosphere, but its implications were ominous.

  “Can you park on that ledge?” Berecz asked.

  Kyra scanned it, a narrow shoulder some hundred meters aloft. Above it the mountain was much more steep; surviving bits of vegetation clung precariously among jumbled stones and rain-fed springs. Behind the crest the storm towered steadily higher, lightning a-flicker in its murk. “Why?” she wondered. “Specimens must be mighty sparse there.”

  “Precisely. A simple biosystem, easiest to study. Besides, it appears to me that the trouble has been propagating from the heights. I want samples to compare with what I will collect in the lowland.”

  “M-m-m—bueno, can you be quick about it? That weather will get here pretty soon, and the location’s too damn exposed for my liking.”

  “An hour should suffice.” And maybe not a lot more to solve the riddle, Kyra thought. The equipment she conveyed had amazing powers, not to mention the labs back in Port Fireball. Doing something about the problem might prove less straightforward.

  “Okay,” she agreed. A slight surprise jarred her. Evidently she was acquiring still another Guthrieism.

  Setdown demanded her entire skill. No, she thought after she had bumped to a halt in rock-strewn mud, skill was what humans developed. A machine had potentialities, which self-reprogramming on the basis of data input made into capabilities. She opened the door and extruded a gangway. Thunder roll
ed loud through her fuselage. Berecz led his pack of biologists out.

  Watching them take pictures, gather specimens, extract cores, Kyra felt uneasiness grow. This was a treacherous place at best, under conditions turning dangerous. The more she looked at it, the more she sensed the wind and the wet and the noise of oncoming rain, the more leery she became. Berecz didn’t notice. His flesh had never cared to travel and his homeland was mostly a flat plain. She recalled the Cordilleras of Earth and Luna, Olympus Mons, weird Miranda, what robots had transmitted from the highlands of Venus and Mercury. No two worlds were ever alike, no forecasts ever sure, but she knew there was a wrongness here.

  “Listen,” she called at last, “I want to do a flit. I’ll come back in thirty minutes or so. Bien?”

  “As you wish,” he responded absently, engrossed.

  “A word of advice. Stick every sample in your personal box at once. We may have to leave in a hurry.”

  “Indeed?” His response conveyed indifference, but she could hope he’d follow her counsel.

  She lifted vertically, fighting the whole way. Above the peak, vapors flew ragged and the vanguard of the rain slashed at her metal. From its cave of lightnings the storm howled at her. It had reached the western side. Chaos boiled under her opticals. By radar she watched torrents dash from the sky and down the stone-thick flanks. Their net wrapped clear across the lower eastern slopes. Kyra struggled to keep position while her beams probed.

  Sanamabiche! Yon boulder shaken, washed loose, bounding in a rush of the water it had dammed, down toward an incline of scree—Kyra slewed about. Air shrieked behind her dive.

  She herself didn’t yell. That wasn’t download style. It wasn’t Fireball style. “Gabe,” she said, “I’ve got to snatch you out. Grab the cable I’ll lower and hang on.”

  “What is this?” he replied. She sent him a view of what it was, gathering force in its descent.

  Winch out the wire rope. Be glad Guthrie insisted on every provision against emergencies that it was practical to carry. A fox has two exits from his den, he’d said once. The line lashed about in her airstream. She slowed to barely over stalling speed. Her fuselage bucked and groaned. On her first pass, Berecz missed. She fought her way back and saw him lay claws on the cable. Immediately she climbed.

  None too soon. The landslide raged over the ledge and onward till it had buried half the blighted ground. Kyra went on beyond, hovered where Berecz could let go, and landed near him. The storm crossed the mountain and fell upon them.

  Machines, they suffered no harm. Nor were they in shock, or even in need of rest. When the weather slacked off, the ecologist carried on alone while Kyra flew back to fetch replacement robugs. At Port Fireball she left off the specimens he had already prepared.

  They both returned there after four of the planet’s brief days. By then Berecz’s observations had led him to a hypothesis which work in the laboratory at the base appeared to confirm. Further research was required, but he felt confident.

  “Without natural enemies, the earthworms that were introduced have multiplied explosively,” he said. “The computer model predicted this, of course, but did not consider the destabilization of gradients. From the biological standpoint, it was a very secondary effect. Hence the landslide. As for the dieback, that sudden loosening of the substrate, and concomitant chemical changes, caused a correspondingly sudden leaching out of alkalis, until the pH of the soil went intolerably high.”

  “Just a local hitch, then, that came near doing you in by coincidence,” Kyra said. “I suppose it’s correctible by adding the right stuff to the humus mix.”

  “I fear matters are not so simple. Other poisons will act elsewhere, salt, selenium, perhaps radioactives, and who knows what more? We cannot watch over a planet as we can over a cottage garden. And what different kinds of attack will it launch on us? The populations we introduce are disease-free, but they cannot remain so indefinitely. Essential bacteria will mutate into pathogens. Lengths of DNA will turn into viruses. Mere imbalance between species can prove fatal; consider how deer, when their predators were eliminated, increased until they over-grazed their ranges and starved. On Earth we discovered how hard it is to repair a damaged ecology that took three billion or more years to evolve. On Demeter we hope to create one de novo within a century or two. We cannot. We can merely found it. Thereafter it must develop and maintain itself.”

  “I know that, in a general way. This in the Mycenaeans has driven the lesson home to me. Didn’t you misspeak a bit, though? The nature we dream of can’t spring into being from a few seeds we plant. We have to be part of it from the first and on till the last—we, our machines and our people.”

  “Yes, yes. But that great oneness transcends my poor imagination. We cannot truly model it, either. It is a chaotic system, as you and I have lately experienced. We can only, humbly, do whatever we think may help.”

  49

  OUT OF THE abyss, Eiko’s first half-clear thought was How is Kyra? How is her baby? Memory, dismay, stabbed from the marshalling center on Earth where she had heard the admission, across forty-seven years, four and a third light-years. Banzai daft, to embark pregnant! The chance of never awakening from that half-death was too high at best—Awareness fell apart into confusion and pain. Pitiless, the things at her side and the things within her held fast to the shards.

  After some fraction of forever she drew back together. Now she knew mostly nausea, foul tastes and stenches, a thirst as if her blood had turned to sand. She achieved realizing that she would live. Later she became able to tell herself that that was worth hoping for.

  Of course she was sick, very sick. She had lain invaded by tubes and wires, pervaded by chemicals and nanostructures, in fluid of subfreezing cold. Despite shielding and electromagnetic screening, radiation had seeped through, and it had welled from atoms of her own, to wreak harm that quiescent cells could not repair. The damage must be mended, the foreign stuffs flushed out, the body reschooled. She got that far before she toppled into darkness.

  The time came when what claimed her was a natural sleep, though light and full of dreams. She roused to clarity. Utter strengthlessness held her in its calm. A robot entered the ward, spoke gentle words, and helped her swallow some broth. Afterward she lay back, understood that her father must be dead, and quietly wept.

  From then on she recovered hour by hour. With health came increasing cheer and, gradually, eagerness for the future. The life she had lost—no, forsaken—would always be an ache in her, like the phantom pain she had read about which amputees felt where limbs had been, before regeneration was possible. But the vitality, the whole meaning, had been fast draining out of that life, and her father had blessed her departure.

  She began to chat with the patients on either side of her bed. The robots informed her about such others whom she knew as had been revived to date; only a few at a time could be. Kyra Davis was a month ahead of her and should soon be able to go groundside. Nero Valencia had been processed in the last group before Eiko and recently discharged from isolation. They both wished her well. No direct meeting could happen till she too had been released, which wouldn’t be until her immune system was operating properly again. Any communication equipment in here would have been an unaffordable extravagance of payload mass. She didn’t much mind, having always found enough of interest inside her head.

  Still, the daycycles dragged. She rejoiced when an examination informed the physician down on Demeter that she was out of danger. Two robots helped her through a passage to the women’s convalescent ward. There she found small individual multi sets, sent up from the planet, and access to a database which included most of humankind’s culture.

  The short walk exhausted her. After taking orbit, the ship had divided in two halves, joined by a ten-kilometer fullerene cable, and gone a-spin. The weight thus furnished was as low as compatible with the physiology of Earthfolk, but she had lost nearly all muscle tone.

  Regaining it required systematic exercise
. She also had other aspects of humanness to practice. During the next daywatch, following a brief workout and a long hot bath, she was brought to a recliner in the common room.

  The chamber was as austere as everything else aboard, basically an empty space where people could mingle. The heavens outside filled a large viewscreen. Across blackness drifted stars, Milky Way, damped-down sun A, fierce light-point of B, and Demeter, Demeter. At this moment the planet was a crescent, not marbled like Earth but white, beclouded. She could see where weather swirled. One rift shone sapphire, ocean, at its edge an ocher that might be a continent. She searched for the companion ships, but couldn’t pick any out.

  Half a dozen colonists were present, in various stages of rehabilitation. None were acquaintances of hers. They advanced courteously to congratulate her and the two newcomers with her. But then appeared Kyra. She brushed past them, big and forceful, as a wind might, and knelt to embrace her friend. After the sterility of the isolation ward and the cautious contacts since, this—warmth, solidity, sunny-smelling hair and lips alive against her cheek—overwhelmed.

  “Bienvenida, querida, bienvenida,” Kyra exulted. “We made it, the both of us.”

  She rose. Eiko looked up the height and fullness and whispered through a fluttering, “Oh, the child?”

  Kyra laughed and slapped her belly. “Just fine, I’m told. Good stock.”

  “That is splendid. I was so afraid for you. … But will the … the situation … not be difficult?”

  “Sure. A while before I can go spacing again, no doubt. But then, it’ll be a while anyway, and I trust the little rascal will be worth any delays. Consider me a pioneer. My case won’t stay unique. It better not!”

  Eiko smiled. “I imagine I shall be a homebody, working as a coordinator. When you are away … perhaps I can care for the child I would be happy to.”