Harvest of Stars

by Poul Anderson

  His scalp prickled. “N-no. They can’t have been at it long, or be many. Else we’d have heard.”

  “I suppose. I haven’t counted them.”

  Hugh sensed how his tension troubled her, and sought for an easing. “You and your folks, you live in a house, right?”

  “It isn’t a big house,” Charissa admitted. “I’ve seen houses on the multi. This is a, a cabin. But it’s snug.”

  He couldn’t escape bluntness. “Why do you do it?”

  “Why—why—We’re happy.” She took a defensive stance. “Jason-Father says it’s too cramped and mechanical everywhere else that people are.”

  “But he hasn’t made woodsrunners of his family.”

  “Certainly not!” She sounded indignant. “Can’t you see?”

  Taking that for an invitation, he gave himself the pleasure of studying her in detail. Her tunic was natural fiber and dyes, well-woven, well-tailored; similarly for her pocket belt, and its buckle was annealed neopine resin. Her entire being spoke of good nutrition, adequate medical and dental protection, freedom from toil such as bent the body and stunted the soul.

  Though it appeared that a handful of eccentrics had adopted a pseudo-savage life, Jason-Father and Betty-Mother weren’t among them. A multi and a power source were obviously not the only things they had taken along when they retreated into the wilderness. And … it wasn’t a piece of primeval Earth revived. Those ancient forests had provided food, fuel, timber, fiber, skins, furs, bone, horn, remedies, an abundance never intended but discovered. On Demeter lived species meant to be viable, fully in the natural world, but also serving human needs. Nicknames drifted through Hugh’s thoughts: mulch bacteria, copper algae, fleshfruit, woolbark, healer mold … If these had taken a strong hold in the Achaean outback, then, given perhaps a tool kit, a polyrobot, and a basic nanoarray—Yes, it would be most interesting to see what they had wrought at Dandelion Glen.

  Charissa flushed beneath Hugh’s regard, though she didn’t seem to mind very much. “We trade things we make, for what they hunt and gather,” she explained earnestly. “But we are—are—settlers.”

  “This will be priority news at headquarters,” he said. “It upsets everything for us.”

  He hadn’t expected instant alarm. Had she picked up cues of hostility to authority from her parents? Why? They had done nothing illegal. It would have been better if they’d given notice of their intent to seek the forest—and quite likely they hadn’t because they knew the biological service would discourage them from it—but still—Maybe hers was simply a nymph’s timidity when for the first time she met a warrior in bronze, with plumed helmet and sword at side.

  “You see—” Hugh stumbled, “the reason I’m here—” He dropped into lecture mode, hoping that would soothe her. “This isn’t a climax forest, you realize. It’s new, and changing fast. The genes were designed for quick maturation, the warmth and carbon dioxide level make it possible, but at this stage the ecology isn’t stable. We aim for an eventual steady state, trees that last for centuries, a million different plants and animals—”

  “I know,” Charissa interrupted, a bit impatiently.

  That struck him as a promising sign. “Bueno, we’ve reached a point in Achaea where we’re thinking of introducing bigger game. Deer, for instance. That means making sure they won’t graze their range to death, which means bringing in wolves to control them, and, and … endless complications. I’m running survey to help find out whether the country is ready for this, whether it can take it without harm.”

  Rapture burst from her. “Deer? Wolves?” She dropped the basket and clapped her small hands together. “Eagles?”

  He raised a palm. “Por favor, listen. The presence of humans, resident in the woods, using them, even if you’re only a scattering, this changes the situation completely. We can’t go ahead as we’ve planned while you’re here.”

  She shrank back, abruptly terrified. “You’d send us away?” she gasped. “You won’t!” she screamed. “Guthrie-Chief won’t let you!”

  Dismayed in his turn, he exclaimed back, “Of course he wouldn’t!” A part of him thought how the irreverent, libertarian old bastard had become a god of sorts, fountainhead of law and justice. “Have no fears, Charissa. Honestly. All this means is that we need to reconsider. We may slow down, we may go faster, I don’t know, but—but we’ll hear what your father and mother and you have to say, we’ll work out what’s best for everybody.”

  With childlike volatility, she calmed. “Th-thank you, … Hugh.” She brushed knuckles across tears, straightened, and agreed reverently, “We’ll find what’s best for Demeter.”

  Gladness welled in him. “You understand.”

  “We do. My folk.”

  “I think,” he said low, “I may have met the future today.”

  Merriment sprang up. “Oh, don’t be so solemn.” She danced over the moss to seize his arm. “Come along home, do!”

  57

  That the biosphere would expand beyond the control capabilities of a humanlike mind was predictable from the first. We can supply you with the specifications of and instructions for a sophotect to which the problems involved are trivial.

  ON A HILLTOP in North Argolis stood three cypresses. Rapidly growing, they had been bent and gnarled by the winds until they bore an aspect of immemorial antiquity. Eiko thought this no illusion but truth. What was time other than the succession of events? A hundred years of memory could pass in an eyeblink and a world doomed to death contain eternity.

  She set her flitter down near the bottom and got stiffly out. Except for small groves and single trees, well apart—live oak, pine, crabapple—the landscape rolled grassy, silver-green a-ripple kilometer after kilometer, rising west-ward to mountains whose peaks made a low crown along that horizon, falling eastward to a remote gleam of ocean. Light spilled from above; a few clouds floated blue-shadowed white in an immensity through which the sun A strode noonward. Thence also drifted the delirious piping of a lark. A breeze cooled her brow. It carried scents of wild thyme.

  Once easy, the climb uphill soon shot pains through her hip joints. She leaned hard on her staff and often stopped to catch breath. Well, when at rest she enjoyed views that widened as she mounted.

  No complaints. Earth had rounded Sol well over a hundred times since she came to birth, she neared the bounds of what cellular medicine could do, but she kept her senses, most of her wits, and strength for at least one last ascent. It was enough, overflowingly enough.

  Still, she felt glad to reach the top and lower herself carefully onto the duff that covered it, in the dappled shade of the cypresses. Their boughs crooked bunches of tourmaline needles against sky and distance. The cover they had dropped was soft, warm to the touch, sweet-smelling, though that was overborne by the rosemary clustered nearby. Bees hummed golden about those tiny flowers, which were the color of heaven just above yonder gorge. Down its granite went the white arrowshaft of a waterfall.

  Her heart slowed. Behind her hulked a lichenous gray boulder. She had often sat long times watching light and shadow weave across it, drawing serenity from the mass and unplanned shapeliness. Today, though, she leaned back and let it give her some of what it had drunk from the sun.

  Peace descended.

  It never quite had for Nero, she recalled. He came with her now and then to be polite, to be kind, and no doubt he liked the vistas, but there was too much stallion in him.

  Peace. Regret became one with the air. She had never tried to curb his heart. And so at last the flooding Scamander took him, and his bones lay somewhere under the cliffs of Troas, but what better ending could he have desired? How long ago it was, and their years together like a dream … yet that day in the meadow at—Where? She had lost the place name. No matter. He reached high to pluck a spray of orange blossoms and gave it to her in exchange for a kiss, why, that happened only now, his laugh had hardly finished—

  “Eiko.”

  She started out of her drowse a
nd blinked from right to left. A small wind ruffled the rosemary. A raven had settled on a branch. He sheened black as a midnight sea.

  “Eiko, Eiko,” called the low voice.

  She came fully awake and sat straight. The duff crackled beneath her thin haunches. “Who is this?” she asked, unafraid but uncertain. “Where are you?”

  “Just me, Eiko. Kyra.”

  “Oh—” They had met like this before, though never here. Hidden in the shrubbery must be a robug or some other little device that could speak. But it was no more than an instrument for the download. “I didn’t know you had—”

  —grown the sensory network this far. That was no slight undertaking. Did Kyra see with electronic eyes or the eyes of that raven, did she hear with electronic ears or the vibrant wings of those bees?

  The reply faltered. “I … held back till lately. This hill is yours.”

  “No, of course it isn’t. I am fond of it, yes, but—”

  “I think I can tell what’s holy, clearer than when I was alive.”

  Eiko’s vision stung and blurred. “You would always have been welcome!”

  “Finally I dared hope so,” Kyra said. “And I thought we might best talk of … certain things … here.”

  Eiko swallowed. “Then it is well you decided. I may never come back.”

  “A hard climb, at your age.”

  “And I will not come any other way. That would be wrong.”

  “Holiness.”

  Eiko’s mind leaped to what the windlike whisper said before. “You are not dead, Kyra, not a machine thing!”

  Laughter clucked low. “Don’t scoff at my kinfolk. They brought us to Demeter, they made all of this be.”

  Eiko shook her white head. “No. We did, using them.”

  “Myself, I’ve loved various machines. My darling Kestrel—” The voice went down into silence.

  Eiko wondered if Kyra was trying to console her, who didn’t need it. “You aren’t one, whatever they say,” she declared under heaven. “You are alive. More alive than … than I am now. Than I perhaps ever was.”

  “That is why I am with you today.”

  Bewilderment: “What, to say farewell? No, no, I have several more years in me, surely.” They ought to be gentle.

  “Nothing is sure. Besides, what I have to ask of you should be done soon, before you grow more frail.”

  Eiko held out her arms, as if a body were there to embrace. “However I can help you, dear friend, I, I shall be happy. Honored.” In truth. It was not alone Kyra-who-had-been that spoke, it was the living planet.

  “Don’t promise till you’ve heard.”

  A stillness fell. The breeze blew stronger, sending waves uphill through the grass. Eiko listened to it. Needles stirred along the knurly bough where the raven sat.

  “You know I’m being overwhelmed,” Kyra said.

  Eiko nodded. “I have heard. The burden on you grows too great.”

  “It was never a burden. I don’t want to lay it down. But I need help. This life, around the whole world—” Kyra paused again. “I’ve guided it well, mostly. So well that it’s grown into more than I can cope with or understand, more than I can be.”

  “I thought—sophotects—”

  Kyra sighed. “They talk of it, the scientists. Most of them take it for granted, I suppose. That in the next ten or fifteen years I’ll first be supplemented, then supplanted, by an artificial intelligence.”

  “Do you resist this? You’ve spoken well of machines.”

  “I have. I was one once, and content to stop existing.”

  Eiko halted the words at her teeth: As I am content. It wasn’t the same. She, Eiko, knew none of the inner despair she thought must have been the download’s: for she would depart in the fullness of her days.

  “No longer,” Kyra went on. “You’re right. I live, I want to live, there’s meaning in it. Besides, I don’t believe a robot mind should rule Demeter.”

  “It would be superior to yours or mine,” Eiko ventured.

  “Intellectually. Maybe even in its feelings, its spirit, whatever it may have. But it isn’t us.”

  Foreknowledge came, bearing sudden calm. Eiko nodded. “The unspoken, almost unadmitted reason we moved to Centauri,” Earthfolk and Lunarians.

  “We fled. What a sophotect would bring us is conscious control of everything, everything. Should that be, everywhere and forever, through as far as the ships may ever go across the universe?”

  “More than one path to enlightenment.”

  “Have you guessed what I’ll ask of you, Eiko?”

  “You wish me to download and join you.”

  “I’m not grabbing at dustmotes. I’ve thought and I’ve felt—sensed, with a wholeness beyond thought—I believe we together—maybe others later, I don’t know—but we would become more than the two of us. I believe we could find our way to unity, a unity that will last, of life around this world.”

  Sunlight and shadow, Eiko’s father reminded her of exponential functions and threshold effects. He smiled and went away again into the wind. “It may be,” she said, “though I—the download would not be I.”

  “Nor am I Kyra Davis,” the voice breathed. “But I was. I remember.”

  Eiko found no answer.

  “I know,” she heard after a moment. “You imagine your poor bereft ghost-self, and wouldn’t condemn it to that. But this is different, Eiko. It’s life. Not human, no. In some ways, less. But life.”

  Resolution returned. “In some ways, perhaps more. In what it does, what it serves, indeed more.”

  “Don’t decide at once. I’d never force you, dear. Think.”

  “Meditate,” Eiko said, half to herself. “Seek.”

  “Blessings.”

  B rose above the sea, brilliance into brightness, like a drifting seed of fire. The lark took up his song anew. Eiko gazed at the light-changeable roughnesses in the cypress bark across from her. Warmth had raised such a rosemary odor that she could well-nigh taste it. Rosemary for remembrance, she remembered. Was Kyra still present, loving her but granting her a silence? Eiko felt no need to ask. After a while the raven spread his wings, their blackness cracked the air, and flew off. Eiko made an offering to Demeter:

  This high summer’s day—

  Beneath it, a winter night

  Amid the same stars.

  58

  Your impression is incorrect. Humans are not becoming subordinate to the sophotectic complex, nor even dependent on it. The machines that have liberated them from the necessity of work are vastly simpler. Individuals, associations, communities, and cultures develop in their diverse ways, and the need to prevent violence between them is now infrequent. If world population continues to decline, that is both ecologically and psychologically desirable. It is true that an increasing percentage of superior humans and meta-morphs integrate themselves with the system, but this does not transform, rather it transcends their nature. They realize their fullest potential and then go beyond it.

  IN THE BEGINNING, antimatter production was a joint enterprise. Lunarians and Earthborn shared skills, resources, and robots to build the facilities on Hephaistos and in orbit around that inmost planet of A. Before many years, however, the Lunarians on their own added much to those installations. It was natural, for their swiftly expanding spatial engineering was voracious of energy and their ambitions for the future seemed insatiable. Nevertheless the sheer scale of the new making astonished Demetrians. When questioned, Lunarian leaders spoke of such things as eventual interstellar voyages, but never very specifically, unless among themselves. Guthrie opined that they weren’t quite sure either, and that a good deal of what they did was for other than economic reasons—challenge, prestige, rivalry between their lords.

  The cryoelectrics by which antimatter was normally stored would not suffice for such huge quantities; the number of units required would become absurd. The solution to this problem was characteristically grandiose.

  The capture of Proxim
a by A and B had wreaked havoc on the outer comet cloud of the double star, flinging many away and many others inward. In that epoch, planets and moons suffered tremendous bombardments, and the space around them remained afterward more hazardous than around Sol’s family. The inner cloud was troubled too, but less so, chiefly by acquiring new members traveling eccentric and skewed paths, which brought about further collisions. Perhaps a series of these was responsible for the orb that humans named Hades after an exploratory probe found it. Mostly ice, it possessed a rocky core which brought its mass close to one percent of Earth’s. Thus it had a respectable gravity field. The core being solid and nonferrous, it generated no magnetic field to complicate things. At its distance from the suns, their winds were barely measurable.

  The Lunarians ferried their excess antimatter out to those far reaches. They put it in orbit around Hades. The bulk of it was antihydrogen, but a fair proportion was antihelium, plus a significant amount of heavier nuclei aggregated into solid spherules. Outside this ring was another of ordinary gas. Between the two went four small asteroids to be shepherd satellites, maintaining stability through the whole fantastic configuration.

  The project was enormous, it strained capabilities, but once completed it soon repaid every cost. Robotic ships need only take their cargoes to it and, with due precision, discharge the stuff into the inner ring. Losses were continuous but slight; the outer ring gave considerable protection, and cosmic rays from other directions did not gnaw away more than could be tolerated. From time to time, every five or ten years, the orbit of a shepherd needed some adjustment. For this purpose it had a motor. That was not the powerful one which had brought it here, whose exhaust would have been disruptive, but one, well supplied with fuel, that could apply sufficient gentle nudges. A Lunarian engineer went out and oversaw the operation from a safe distance.

  So the hoard accumulated, decade by decade until the catastrophe.