Harvest of Stars

by Poul Anderson

  “Well, for me time’s chronically short,” Guthrie replied. “Besides, while you were doing your tinkering and testing and retinkering, you didn’t need me underfoot.”

  “You’d have been welcome whenever you cared to come, though I admit we wouldn’t have had much to show you earlier. But we do appreciate how you’ve let us get on with our job unmolested by any bureaucrats.”

  “Traditional Fireball policy, whenever I figured a nominee could cut the mustard.” Guthrie made a chuckle. “In your case, I had extra reason to, namely, mercy on the bureaucrats.” Rudbeck was a descendant of Guthrie’s living self.

  “And now you’ve achieved a breakthrough?” Kyra prompted.

  Rudbeck smiled. “Nothing so dramatic. We’ve gnawed our way forward till we have a system that appears to work as it ought. The real credit goes to the field scientists and, yes, the robots and downloads before them, those who gathered the data and piece by piece learned what they mean, how things happen on this planet and why.” He bowed. “Muchas gracias.”

  Kyra had acquired sufficient art of generating a voice that hers registered surprise. “To me? When I go into the field, I’m just a pilot.”

  “Pilots are sorely needed,” Guthrie said. “Also, more than once you’ve saved somebody’s valuable ass. I heard.”

  “At any rate,” Rudbeck continued, “the incoming information gradually showed us how we should correct our programs and, often, redesign our hardware.” Enthusiasm bore him onward, unnecessarily: “When you’re trying to telescope millions of years of ecological development into two or three hundred, on a global scale because nothing less is possible, it isn’t like gardening. Even if we could be certain what to do—and we can’t, it’s too complex, it goes chaotic—even then, the sheer volume of work and the speed with which an unstable order of things can crash, they’d overwhelm any set of control systems we could ever produce. For an elementary example, do you remember the business of the Thessalian clover?”

  “Sure,” Guthrie grunted. “Who doesn’t?”

  According to plan, the new-made soil in that wet region had been sown with a new-made moss which should rapidly make it suitable for those humble microbes and invertebrates on which higher species depended. This had gone well, and clovers were introduced to enrich the ground further. Unfortunately and unforeseen, they grew so widely, so densely, that they made the thin peatlike substrate friable. Rain began eroding down toward bed-rock. The best way to limit the clovers seemed to be to bring in predators on the bees that pollinated them. But these insects, developed from wasp DNA, gave rise to a mutant variety whose free-ranging larvae decimated the worms that aerated and fertilized the soil. A specifically designed virus—Nature in Thessaly was still lurching from one catastrophe to the next.

  Rudbeck flushed. “I’m sorry. Got carried away. Didn’t mean to lecture at you like a teacher to children.”

  “Not to worry,” Guthrie said. “My ego’s pretty thick-skinned. Go on.”

  “Gracias, sir. Let me state the basic principle. You’ve heard it, it seems obvious, but only lately has it been proven with mathematical rigor. We can’t continue sending our robots and our nanotech molecules scurrying around to find out whatever’s going wrong and repair the damage. Either life on Demeter dies back to extinction above the microscopic level, aside from a few plots maintained by unremitting and ridiculously large efforts, or else it expands and evolves. In the second case, ecological complexity will increase faster than any regulatory system of ours can grow—unless we make such a host of regulators that they crowd the life out of existence.”

  “I know. Government has the same property, though very few people and no politicians ever wanted to realize it. Yet we haven’t got time for nature to balance herself. Your bunch has been searching for a way between the horns of the dilemma. Okay, now that I’ve had my revenge and astounded you with the revelation that horses have four legs, can you explain to me in nickel words what you have accomplished?”

  “I’ll do my best. But por favor, come in! I should not have kept you standing here.”

  “We don’t mind,” Kyra said. Downloads and machinery.

  Rudbeck conducted them about, presented his staff to them, showed the equipment, keyed up the computer displays. The dimensions of his quiet victory emerged.

  An organism is a unity. Its nigh-infinite intricacies of detection, ingestion, absorption, excretion, perception, reaction, chemistries, electron flows, feedbacks, dynamics mesh together in the service of survival. Ultimately this means the survival and propagation of the life-helix; but to that end, usually, the organism must prevail over its enemies and adversities. Given the minimum of nourishment and protection from the raw cosmos, it will endure, keep itself strong, heal its wounds, put down the treacheries of aberrant cells, and seek how it may increase the kingdom of its kind. The supreme example is a human being, whose brain is at once director, information processor, foremost of the glands, and wellspring of desire.

  A natural ecology is no more than a set of relationships among organisms. However wonderfully complex and subtle, they are the result of geological eras of strife, blind chance, the modifications that life itself has made in its surroundings, and pitiless winnowing of all that does not find ways to belong. The network of beings may last for an age; but at any time, any accident to its territory or any intrusion of outsiders may bring ruin. The stones of Earth record half a dozen mass extinctions, when suddenly most great races died; the lesser, local obliterations are beyond counting. How vulnerable, then, is life uprooted from that entire long history and worldwide matrix, made to begin over again in lands that hitherto were wholly barren?

  Only if an ecology is an organism—

  “The basic idea is old, of course,” Rudbeck said. “I wouldn’t be surprised but what speculation goes back to when the first transmissions arrived from Demeter. Maybe further, jefe?” He glanced at Guthrie but got no response. “We should establish the equivalent of a nervous system. Nothing as crude as a lot of sensors giving input to a lot of computers which give orders to a lot of robots: though pretty clearly, something of the kind would have to be included. Mainly, we’d need molecular structures that amount to symbionts, growing naturally with and within most plants and possibly some animals, interconnecting at need across distances as large as necessary. Not forming sense organs or brains or anything quite like that, but … equivalent. The trick, the problem was to find how this could be done. What might work, what might be the side effects or the critical consequences? In the long run, what could make the decisions and carry them out in the same unthinking natural fashion as your body—as a living body does for everything that goes on inside itself?”

  “According to your reports that I’ve seen, you were floundering around till you came on a basic new understanding,” Guthrie said.

  Rudbeck shrugged. “A half-understanding. It began when Farquhar took a fresh look at the theory of how mitochondria had entered into symbiosis with primitive prokaryotes. She showed, in light of our observations here, that the theory was inadequate. Then Kristoffer formalized the symbology and put the data through a Yamato tensor—But this is pretty abstract, I’m afraid, and after the theorems were proven we had the practicalities to work out.”

  Guthrie’s eyestalks swung back toward the array of organic and inorganic units he had been inspecting. It was astonishingly small. “Which you did,” he said, “and here is your baby.”

  “No, an embryo,” Rudbeck demurred. “It’s limited to six or seven thousand square kilometers, and it’s far from complete. Spread very thinly, in fact, crude, too; rudimentary; full of flaws. And suited only to this particular territory, this particular nature. But within its limitations, it is functional. It’s … learning. For instance, in exposed areas where winter nights get cold, workers have found that creeping juniper planted around sapling aspen and alder generally insulates their roots enough for them to survive and grow. Bueno, we’ve noticed those species volunteering together
in places where they never grew before. We’ve tracked robugs carrying the seeds to the sites, with no specific instructions from us or from any program we wrote. The programs have been revising themselves!”

  Pride rang. “The system will expand of its own accord. It will change, improve—sometimes with our help, sometimes, I suspect, in spite of us. It will adapt to every environment and ecology on Demeter. I don’t expect I’ll live to see the end result, but at last there will be a biosphere that’s an organism, loose, mostly functioning in local nodes, but a global organism.”

  “‘Vaster than empires and more slow,’” said Kyra.

  “Pardon?” asked Rudbeck.

  “A line from an ancient poem. I was thinking of signals transmitted across continents and oceans.”

  “Not limited to chemical speeds. I showed you the system has electronic, photonic, and mechanical components. Eventually we want to incorporate artificial intelligence—full, conscious AI. That requires a much more sophisticated system, of course, but meanwhile we’ll be learning about the advances the psychoneticists on Earth make.”

  “Nine calendar years, damn near, between question and answer,” said Guthrie. “Your baby needs to be up and running pretty soon. If you don’t want it committing itself to a structure that can’t accommodate awarenesses, you’d better have them in the circuits from the start, at least part time.”

  Rudbeck nodded. “We realize that. Provisions already exist for temporarily including a download—simply to observe, at first, and perhaps nothing more will be called for till we get a real cybermind.”

  “Why haven’t you tried it?”

  “Uncertainties. We want to refine our techniques before adding to them.”

  “Why? Any risks involved?”

  “Not as far as we can see, but I repeat, we don’t yet know enough, we can’t anticipate every possible mischance.”

  “And you never will till you’ve tried.” Guthrie’s eyestalks quivered. “Listen, put me in. Now.”

  Rudbeck stared. “Are you serious?”

  “I had this in mind when I came out today. That’s how come I arrived nekkid. All I wanted beforehand was the tour you’ve given us, to settle a few matters I wasn’t sure about. Go ahead. Why not? Unscientific, an uncontrolled experiment, yeah, but can it hurt?”

  Rudbeck shook his head. “It could hurt you.”

  “Nonsense. I’ve come through more and worse mistreatment than I’d want you to imagine. What will this do other than give me a notion—dim, no doubt, preliminary, but a notion from the inside—of how your organism will feel? Which I’ve got a hunch will be mighty helpful to me.”

  “Don’t you dare!” Kyra exclaimed. “If you insist on a report like that, take me out of this body and I’ll give you one.”

  “Balls,” retorted Guthrie. “You were an officer of Fireball. Would you let a man of yours take a chance you wouldn’t? Anyway, this isn’t a gamble. It’s a look-see. I hereby pull rank and claim the fun for myself.” His voice sank. “Something new, not a quiviran shadow-show but real, after so many dry years—” Roughly: “Can do, Rudbeck? Okay, snap to it.”

  He could override argument but not discussion, plans, preparations, precautions. Demeter’s day had drawn to a close when the scientists connected him. Stars wheeled for an hour above the silence, broken by occasional half-whispered banalities, in which they watched the gauges and paced the floor. Then they took him out.

  He said little except, low and slowly, “I can’t describe it. Maybe if you got a poet. For a while, almost, I thought I was alive again.”

  The humans were exhausted, and what hospitality had they to bid these guests? After goodbyes, Kyra took Guthrie back to their flyer. Her footfalls resounded loud through the night. Hill and heath glimmered where hoar-frost caught starshine.

  “I’d have been less shocked at your recklessness if you hadn’t wiped your duplicate,” she said.

  “I didn’t,” Guthrie stated. “He’s right here, all his memories, transferred into me.”

  “Why?”

  “You know perfectly well. One of me handled matters in the Solar System and the emigrant ships while the other went ahead and took charge here, but after both of me were on Demeter, two rambunctious old bastards would’ve gotten in each other’s way. We intended from the first that we’d merge.”

  “I mean why didn’t you keep the second program deactivated but in reserve? Especially if you were going to cut corners like today.”

  “Hell, that was about as hazardous as raising on a straight flush. I figured a spare me had become a bad idea. Sooner or later the colony will have to get along on its own. In fact, if it can’t by now, it doesn’t deserve to.”

  “We’d … miss you, jefe.”

  Guthrie laughed. “Oh, I aim to stick around for a goodly while.” His tone softened. “Yes, after this experience. … Don’t you, Kyra?”

  “I think not,” she answered.

  He considered her, as if his lenses could read expression in her turret. “Aren’t you happy?”

  “I’m not unhappy. It doesn’t apply. I’m interested in what I do. But when nobody has urgent need of me any longer, I’ll be content to stop.”

  “A session in yon biocenter might change your mind. I’d like that, querida. I really would.”

  “Sorry, jefe,” she said. “I don’t believe I’ll want to try.”

  “Why not, if I may ask?”

  “It would remind me of too much that I’m closer to in time than you are.” “I see.”

  They spoke no more. She strode on downhill.

  52

  Few inhabitants are left in L-5. The roboticization of space operations being well advanced, it has no function except as a tourist resort, and this is marginal. The general availability of quiviras has brought all such sensations in much easier reach, and in any event there is little public interest in them. Arrangements are being made by which the remaining dwellers can, if they wish, live out their lives in the station. Childbearing among them will be strongly discouraged.

  DISTANCE-DWINDLED, A STILL cast brilliance, a light that to human eyes was white barely tinged with blue. It brought the scarps and craters of Perun sharply forth from shadows that seemed to flow as Merlin curved nearer. Here and there gleamed nickel-iron outcrops, scoured by gigayears of cosmic infall. Beyond the rough spheroid, Voloss was a lump of blackness amidst the stars. Kyra Davis recalled that the Lunarians had recently brought that carbonaceous-chondritic body into orbit around the larger, stony-metallic asteroid, to be a convenient source of water and organics. The software in her torchcraft knew it well and took it into account, executing the commands her fingers issued. She had ample chance to look about her.

  Mostly she gazed at that which trailed Perun in the same path. As yet the spacecraft was a partial skeleton, but already ribs and stringers curved gigantic. At its remove, the construct appeared fragile, exquisite, silver wires shaped and woven into a piece of jewelry for an elfland princess. Magnifying and amplifying, she saw vehicles, robots, spacesuited technicians flit motelike through and around, a dance that evoked music in her head, Mozart, Strauss, Nielsen.

  Would the ship fare as lightly and gladly through the Alpha Centaurian domain, to Proxima and maybe, maybe beyond? Thus far the builders had revealed little, but rumors went abroad about plans for enlarging and using the lasers that had nursed the emigrants to rest, for massless braking by Alfvén waves, for—She had better stop daydreaming, Kyra realized, and concentrate on approach.

  Some thousand kilometers in its maximum diameter, Perun would never, she supposed, bear cities and strong-holds like Luna. However, more structures jutted on it than she had expected, prior to the first Demetrian flight hither. Before then, Lunarian transmissions to the planet were only sketchily informative. She hadn’t taken that for a sign of hostility. These folk were by nature as aloof and secretive as cats. It was a surprise to learn how industrious they’d been, how much they’d wrought in a handful of years and without
the resources of her world to draw on. Now she’d behold for herself. The heart knocked in her breast.

  Domes, masts, pyramids, colonnades—and then, radiant point of roads, the spacefield. It was a flat cap on the north pole, surrounded by hemicylindrical buildings above which loomed the control radar.“Merlin requesting clearance to dock,” Kyra voiced, and heard “Clearance granted,” in a remembered lilting accent. Mere formality on either side; the agreements were long since reached, the computers were entirely in charge. On breaths of jet, the vessel descended to her assigned cradle.

  Silence closed in. Kyra unharnessed and left her seat. She had run at one Demetrian gravity, eight percent less than Earth’s, which had become the norm for her bones and veins and tissues. Although reaccustomed to changes in weight, she felt suddenly ghostly. What did she heft here, five kilos, six? Cautiously she moved down to her personal section, where she stopped for a glance in the mirror. Before commencing final maneuvers she’d changed to white perlux blouse with ruffled front and puffed sleeves, tigryl bolero, blue slacks, diffractor-buckled sandals. Show that her people had gotten to a point where they could go a bit dressy. Don’t give the Lunarians whatever advantage they might find in seeing her as a frump.

  They? Rinndalir, she admitted. Her pulse thudded louder.

  No, God spit on it, she wouldn’t be embarrassed when they met. She wouldn’t let herself be. What reason in the cosmos did she have to be? The mirror showed her straight, supple, a touch on the lean side but that was better than fat and it brought out the bones in her face, which she knew were good. Some lines and crinkles, hair begun dulling toward gray, what of it? She kept alive the relationships that she wanted on her own merits, without having to claim they laid any obligations on anybody. Besides, she had come here not to make connections but to make history.

  A slight impact sounded through hull and air. The gangway had osculated the exit lock. Kyra winked at her image and went on out.