Harvest of Stars

by Poul Anderson

  Kenmuir halted. Tall for an Earthling, he had long ceased letting Lunarian height overawe him. “A surprise. You won’t like it, I’m afraid.” He recited the message. Within him, it sang.

  Valanndray stood motionless. “In truth, a reversal,” he said at length, tonelessly. “What propose you to do?”

  “Set you off with the supplies and equipment, and make for Luna. What else?”

  “Abandonment, then.”

  “No, wait. Naturally, we’ll call in and explain the situation, if they don’t already know at headquarters.”

  The big oblique eyes narrowed. “Nay. The Federals would retrieve it and learn.”

  Irritation stirred. Kenmuir had simply wanted to be tactful. Their months together had given him an impression that his associate was in some ways, down below the haughtiness, quite woundable. Valanndray might have felt hurt that the other man was so ready to leave him behind.

  Just the same, Kenmuir had grown fired of hearing coldly hostile remarks about the World Federation, and this one was ridiculous. Granted, Lunarians had not rejoiced when their world came back under the general government of humankind. Resentment persisted in many, perhaps most, to this day. But—name of reason!—how long before they were born had the change taken place? And their wish for “independence” was flat-out wrong. What nation-states bred while they existed, as surely as contaminated water bred sickness, had been war.

  “The message went in clear because it must, if we were to read it,” Kenmuir said. “We don’t have cryptographic equipment aboard, do we? Very well, it’s in the databases now. Who cares? If somebody does notice it, will he send for the Peace Authority? I hardly think the lady Lilisaire is plotting rebellion.”

  Recognizing his sarcasm, he made haste to adopt mildness: “Yes, we’ll notify the Venture, though I daresay she has already. It ought to dispatch another ship and teammate for you. Within a week or two, I should imagine.”

  He was relieved to see no anger. Instead, Valanndray regarded the spacefarer as if studying a stranger. He saw a man drably clad, lean to the point of gauntness, with big bony hands, narrow face and jutting nose, grizzled sandy hair cut short, lines around the mouth and crow’s-feet at the gray eyes. The look made Kenmuir feel awkward. He was amply decisive when coping with nature, space, machines, but when it came to human affairs he could go abruptly shy.

  “The lords of the Venture will be less than glad,” Valanndray said.

  Kenmuir shaped a smile. “That’s obvious. Upset plans, extra cost.” When everything was marginal to begin with, he thought. The associated companies and colonists didn’t really compete with the Space Service and its sophotects. They couldn’t. What kept them going was, basically, subsidy, from the former aristocratic families and from lesser Lunarians who traded with them out of Lunarian pride. And still their enterprises were dying away, dwindling like the numbers of the Lunarians themselves. …

  He forced matter-of-factness: “But the lady Lilisaire, she’s a power among them, maybe more than you or I know.” His pulse hammered anew.

  Valanndray spread his fingers. A Terran would have shrugged shoulders. “She can prevail over them, yes. Go you shall, Captain.”

  “I, I’m sorry,” Kenmuir said.

  “You are not,” Valanndray retorted. “You could protest this order. But nay, go you will and at higher thrust than a single Earth gravity.”

  Why that grim displeasure? He and Kenmuir had shaken down into an efficient partnership, which included getting along with one another’s peculiarities. A newcomer would need time to adjust. But the Earthman felt something else was underlying.

  Jealousy, that Lilisaire wanted Kenmuir and not him, though Kenmuir was an alien employee and Valanndray kin to her, a member of her phyle? How well the pilot knew that tomcat Lunarian vanity; how well he had learned to steer clear of it.

  Or a different kind of jealousy? Kenmuir pushed the question away. Just once had Valanndray seemed to drop an erotic hint. Kenmuir prompely changed the subject, and it arose no more. Quite possibly he had misunderstood. Who of his species had ever seen the inmost heart of a Lunarian? In any case, they had a quivira to ease them. Kenmuir did not know what pseudo-experiences Valanndray induced for himself in the dream box, nor did the Earthman talk about his own.

  “If you loathe the idea, you can come back with me,” he said. “You’re entitled.” On the Moon, obligations between underlings and overlings had their strength, but it was the strength of a river, form and force incessantly changeable.

  Valanndray shook his head. Long platinum locks fell aside from ears that were not convoluted like Kenmuir’s. “Nay. I have sunken my mind in yonder asteroid for weeks, hypertext, simulations, the whole of available knowledge about it. None can readily replace me. Were I to forsake it, that would leave the Federation so much the richer, so much the more powerful, than my folk.”

  Kenmuir recalled conversations they had had, and dealings he had had with others, on Luna, Mars, the worldlets of the Belt, moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Few they were, those Lunarian spacefarers and colonists, reckoned against Terrankind. Meager their wealth was, reckoned against that which the machines held in the name of Terrankind. But if they leagued in anger and raised all the resources at their beck, it could bring a catastrophe like none that history knew.

  No, hold on. He was being fantastical. Ignore Valanndray’s last words. No revolt was brewing. War was a horror of the far past, like disease. “That’s right loyal of you,” Kenmuir replied.

  “I hold my special vision of the future,” Valanndray told him. “Come the time, I want potency in council. Here I gain a part of it.” The admission was thoroughly Lunarian. “I regret losing your help, in this final phase of our tour; but go, Captain, go.”

  “Uh, whatever the reason the lady’s recalling me, it must be good. For the good of—of Luna—”

  Valanndray laughed. Kenmuir flushed. The good of Luna? Hardly a Lunarian concept. At most, the good of the phyle. Still, that could entail benefit for the entire race.

  “As for me,” Valanndray said, “I will think on this. We can finish our game later. Until evenwatch, Captain.” He laid right palm on left breast, courtesy salute, and strolled out the door.

  Kenmuir stood a while alone. Lilisaire, Lilisaire!

  But why did she want unimportant him at her side?

  Because of the Habitat? Remote and preoccupied as he had been, he had caught only fugitive mentions of that project. It seemed the Federation government was definitely going to go through with it. That would rouse fury on Luna—a feat of engineering that would make mass immigration from Earth possible—but what in the manifold cosmos could he do?

  What should he do? He was no rebel, no ideologue, nothing but a plain and peaceful man who worked in the Venture of Luna because it had some berths for Terrans who would rather be out among the stars than anywhere else.

  Let him shoot a beam to Ceres and ask for an update on Solar System news, with special reference to the Habitat.

  No. A chill traversed him. That call, hard upon what had just passed, might draw notice. Or it might not. But if the cybercosm, ceaselessly scanning its databases in search of significant correlations, turned this one up—

  Then what? He did not, repeat not, intend anything illegal.

  Still, best if he didn’t get that update. Wait till he reached Luna, maybe till he and Lilisaire were secluded.

  Kenmuir realized that he was bound for his stateroom.

  To reach it felt almost like a homecoming. This space was his, was him. Most of his recreations he pursued elsewhere, handball in the gym, figurine sculpture in the workshop, whatever. Here he went to be himself. From the ship’s database he retrieved any books and dramas, music and visual art, that he wished. He thought his thoughts and relived his memories, uninterrupted, unseen if maybe he breathed a name or beat a fist into an open hand. A few flat pictures clung to the bulkheads. They showed the Highland moor of his childhood; the Grand Canyon of the Colorado as
photographed by him; his parents, years dead; Dagny Beynac, centuries dead. …

  From a cabinet he took a bottle and poured a short brandy. He wasn’t given to solitary drinking, or indulgence in glee or brainstir or other intoxicants. He severely rationed both his time in the quivira and the adventures he dreamed there. He had learned the hard way that he must. Now, though, he wanted to uncoil.

  He took his chair, leaned back, put feet on desk. The position was more relaxing under full Earth weight. Yes, bound for Luna, he would most certainly go at that acceleration or better. Lilisaire’s words implied he was free to squander the energy. So he wouldn’t need the centrifuge to maintain muscle tone. Of course, he would keep up his martial arts and related exercises. As for the rest of his hours, he could read, play some favorite classic shows, and—and, right now, call up Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto. His tastes ran to the antique.

  As the notes marched forth, as the liquor smoldered across tongue and into bloodstream, his eyes sought the portrait of Dagny Beynac and lingered. Always her figure had stood heroic before him. He wasn’t sure why. Oh, he knew what she did, he had read three biographies and found remembrances everywhere on Luna; but others had also been great. Was it her association with Anson Guthrie? Or was it, in part, that she resembled his mother a little?

  For the thousandth time, he considered her. The picture had been taken when she was in early middle age. She stood tall for an Earthborn woman, 180 centimeters, against the background of a conservatory where flowers grew extravagant under Lunar gravity. A sari and shawl clothed a form robust, erect, deepbosomed. He knew from recordings that her gait was free-striding. Her features were a bit too strong for conventional beauty, broad across the high cheekbones, with slightly curved nose, full mouth, and rounded chin. Eyes wide-set and sea-blue looked straight from beneath hair that was thick and red, with overtones of bronze and gold, in bangs across the forehead and waves down to the jawline. After half a lifespan of sun and weather and radiation, her skin remained fair. He had heard her voice. It was low, with a trace of burr—”whisky tenor,” she called it.

  If her spirit, like Guthrie’s, had stayed in the world until this day, what might the two of them not have wrought? But no, she ordered oblivion for herself. And she knew best. Surely, in her wisdom, she did.

  Hard to believe that once she too was young, confused, helpless. Kenmuir found his imagination slipping pastward, as if he could see her then. It was a refuge from the present and the future. In the teeth of all fact and logic, he felt himself headed for worse trouble than anybody awaited.

  2

  The Mother of the Moon

  It was always something of an event, reported in the local news media, when Anson and Juliana Guthrie visited Aberdeen, Washington. Self-made billionaires weren’t an everyday sight, especially in a small seaport, twice especially after the lumbering that had been the mainstay of adjacent Hoqu am dwindled away. Not that this pair made a production of their status. On the contrary, they took ordinary accommodations and throughout a stay—usually brief, for their business would recall them—they avoided public appearances as much as possible. Dignitaries and celebrities who tried for their company got more or less politely brushed off. Instead, the Guthries were together with the Stambaughs and, later, the Ebbesens. This too caused wonderment. What could they have in common with people who worked hard to earn a humble living?

  “We hit it off, we enjoy each other, that’s all,” Guthrie once told a reporter. “My wife and I aren’t silver-spoon types either, you know. Our backgrounds aren’t so different from these folks’. We’ve known ’em for years now, and old friends are best, like old shoes, eh?” Those friends said much the same to anyone who asked. The community learned to accept the situation. As the political climate changed, envy of them diminished.

  The relationship came to seem truly remarkable when the Guthries bet all they had on the Bowen laser launcher and founded Fireball Enterprises. Their failure would have been almost as spectacular as their success was, if less meaningful. But after seven years their company dominated space activity near Earth and was readying ships to go harvest the wealth of the Solar System. Nevertheless they returned to Aberdeen every once in a while and were guests in the same small houses.

  At last they even invited young Dagny Ebbesen to come along with them up the coast for a little vacation. Centuries later, Ian Kenmuir could conjecture more shrewdly than her neighbors ever did what the real reason was and what actually went on.

  In the beginning the girl drew strength and comfort more from the woman. Toward the end, though, Juliana drew her husband aside and murmured, “She needs to talk privately with you. Take her for a walk. A long one.”

  “Huh?” Anson raised his shaggy brows. “What makes you think so?”

  “I don’t think it, I feel it,” Juliana replied. “She’s fond of me; she worships you.”

  He harked back to their own daughter—she was in Quito, happily married, but he remembered certain desperate confidences—and after a moment nodded. “Okay. I dunno as how I rate that, but okay.”

  When he rumbled to Dagny, “Hey, you’re looking as peaked as Mount Rainier. Let’s get some salt air in you and some klicks behind you,” she came aglow.

  The resort was antiquated, shingle-walled cottages among trees. Across the crumbling road that ran past it, evergreen forest gloomed beneath a silver-gray sky and soughed in the wind. A staircase led down a bluff to a beach that right and left outreached vision. Below the heights and above the clear sand, driftwood lay tumbled, huge bleached logs, lesser fragments of trees and flotsam. Surf brawled white. Beyond it the waves surged in hues of iron. Where they hit a reef, they fountained. A few gulls rode the wind, which skirled bleak, bearing odors of sea and bite of spindrift. At this fall of the year and in these hard times, Guthrie’s party had the place to themselves.

  He and the girl turned north. For a while they trudged in silence. They made an odd pair, not only because of age. He was big and burly, his blunt visage furrowed beneath thinning reddish hair. Her own hair, uncovered, tossed in elflocks as the single brightness to see. Thus far she still walked slim and light-foot, her condition betrayed by no more than a fullness gathering in the breasts. Whenever she crossed a sprawl of kelp she popped a bladder or two under her heel. When she spied an intact sand dollar, she picked it up with a coo of pleasure. She was, after all, just sixteen.

  “Here.” She thrust it into Guthrie’s hand. “For you, Uncans.”

  He accepted while asking, “Don’t you want it yourself, a souvenir?”

  She flushed. Her glance dropped. He barely heard: “Please. You and … and Auntie—something to ’member me by.”

  “Well, thanks, Diddyboom.” He gave her hand a quick squeeze, let go again, and dropped the disc into a jacket pocket. “Muchas gracias. Not that we’re about to forget you anyhow.”

  The pet names blew away on the wind as though the wind were time, names from long ago when she toddled laughing to him and hadn’t quite mastered “Uncle Anson.” They walked for another span, upon the wet strip where the sea had packed and smoothed and darkened the sand. Water hissed from the breakers to lap near their feet.

  “Please don’t thank me!” she cried suddenly.

  He threw her a pale-blue glance. “Why shouldn’t I?”

  Tears glimmered. “You’ve done so much for me, and I, I’ve never done anything for you. Can’t I even give you a shell?”

  “Of course you can, honey, and we’ll give it a good home,” he answered. “If you think you owe Juliana and me something, pay the debt forward; give somebody else who needs it a leg up someday.” He paused. “But you don’t owe, not really. We’ve gotten plenty enjoyment out of our honorary status. In fact, to us, for all practical purposes, you’re family.”

  “Why?” she half challenged, half appealed. “What reason for it, ever?”

  “Well,” he said carefully, “I’m auld acquaintance with your parents, you know. Your mother since
she was a sprat, and when your dad-to-be married her, I was delighted at what a catch she’d made. Juliana agreed.” He ventured a grin. “I expected she’d call him a dinkum cobber, till she reminded me Aussies these days don’t talk like that unless they’re conning a tourist.”

  “But we, we’re nobody.”

  “Nonsense. Your sort doesn’t take handouts, nor need them. If I gave a bit of help, it was a business proposition.”

  Already in her life she knew otherwise. Helen Stambaugh’s father had been master of a fishing boat till the fisheries failed. Guthrie put up the capital, as a silent partner, for him to start over with a charter cruiser that went up to the Strait of Juan de Fuca and around among the islands. For a while he prospered modestly. Sigurd Ebbesen, immigrant from Norway, became his mate, then presently his son-in-law, and then, with a further financial boost from Guthrie, a second partner captaining a second boat. But the venture collapsed when the North American economy in general did. The old man was able to take an austere retirement. Sigurd survived only because Guthrie persuaded various of his associates and employees that this was a pleasant way to spend some leisure time. However, Dagny, first child of two, must act as bull cook when school was out. She graduated to deckhand, then mate-cum-engineer, still unpaid, her eyes turned starward each night that was unclouded.

  “No,” she protested. “Not business, not really. You, you’re just p-plain good—”

  Her stammer ended. She swallowed a ragged breath, knuckled her eyes, and walked faster.

  Guthrie matched the pace. He allowed her a hundred meters of quietness, except for the wind and surf and sea-mews, before he laid a hand on her shoulder and said, “Friends are friends. I don’t gauge anybody’s worth by their bank accounts. Been poor too damn often, myself, for that.”

  She jarred to a stop. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean—”