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Harvest the Fire
[Harvest of Stars 03]
By Poul Anderson
Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU
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PROLOGUE
Once in his drifting to and fro across Earth, Jesse Nicol found a quivira left over from olden times. It was in a hotel that stood alone, grounds walled on three sides by rain forest, above Iguazu Falls. From the terrace he looked across a lawn to the verge of an abyss. He barely glimpsed the top of one cataract, but upflung mist smoked white into heaven and the roar, though muted by distance, passed into his bones.
Strange, he thought, that anyone here had ever wanted to retreat straight into a dreamworld. When he remarked on it, the manager told him that the raw magnificence they came to see had put some guests into a mood for a wild experience, wherefore this facility had been installed to oblige them.
Nowadays, of course, the place was nearly deserted. Most people who might feel curious about the cascades and the surrounding wilderness preserve were content to stay home and let their vivifers give them multisense-recorded tours. Most rooms stood shut off and empty. Only maintainors purred about on their programmed rounds, holding subtropical air and nature at bay, keeping the building in good repair, for it was a historical relic and did still draw occasional visitors.
Having walked the trails, Nicol returned full of what he beheld. As he washed, changed clothes, and ate alone in the big dining room, served by a silent robot, the waters querned in his spirit, an elemental force. Even on this tamed and machine-teeming planet, he had seen the universe at work. It spoke to him of mightiness and mysteries, meanings beyond words for which he nonetheless longed to find words, evoking the awe in others through lifetime after lifetime to come.
He might as well have tried to sculpture the mists. Nothing would take form; everything slipped through his grasp, save for bare and hueless lumps of phrase that he cast from him in an almost physical spasm.
Exultation drained away. Disgust and despair thickened in his gullet. Again he was failing. Why, why, why? Shakespeare could have drawn a poem out of the thunders to shake the soul(Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!), or Kipling (Wrecks of our wrath dropped reeling down as we fought and we spumed and we strove.), or Borges (Quien lo mira lo veporprimera vez—), or hundreds more across the ages. What crippled him? He could not so much as give voice to his own powerlessness. Hopkins had done it, in the ancestral language that Nicol had ransacked over and over—
Birds build—but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one word that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
despite also creating “Pied Beauty” and “The Windhover.”
Nicol knew he had a gift. He felt it. Genome analysis in his infancy had shown the potential. He didn’t suppose he could have become a new Homer, but surely he could make something worth remembering.
He never had. At best, his verses climbed a little above banality. The knowledge became a corrosion in him, brewing rage that too often spat itself at the closest random object.
He would not let it, not today, when he had just gloried in his smallness and mortality. He called for a third glass of wine and, with an effort, paid heed to aroma and savor. The glow already in his blood strengthened. After a while his thoughts flowed calmly, more ironic than bitter.
The time is out of joint—Yes, old Will had said it, as he said all else. All else human, anyway. His imagination had not encompassed the cybercosm. How could it have? Nicol did not understand today’s world either. What merely organic creature ever would? This era had its virtues, doubtless more people were happy than anywhen else in history, but it was not an era to inspire poets. And no artist works in isolation. However abstract or romantic, art of any kind—not diversion or decoration, but that which lays hold of the soul and will not let go—springs from the realities around it.
Precedents were abundant, moments of radiancy outshining everything that happened for generations earlier and generations afterward, Amarnan, Periclean, Tang, Elizabethan . . . and the dull times, the dim times, when the hack and the academic reigned, when nobody took fire because there was no fire, times whose work soon lay forgotten, unless eventually a scholar exhumed a bit of it for curiosity’s sake.
Nicol had done that now and then, in a desultory, amateur fashion. He had puzzled over the phenomenon, aware that he was by no means the first. Why this jagged distribution of greatness? The incidence of innate abilities could scarcely vary that much. The social situation, the Zeitgeist—were such phrases anything but noises? Usually he had dismissed his speculations with a sneer and a curse.
This evening, however, sitting solitary at the table, he found them astir again, and half in focus. (The scrambled metaphors provoked a wry grin.) A line from Jorge Luis Borges crossed his mind. Well, that man had been among the rare exceptions to the rule. Consider: The first half of the twentieth century was a supernova in literature as well as in science and technology. After about 1950, while knowledge of the cosmos and achievement within it waxed on and on, creativity in the traditional arts guttered close to extinction. What makers from that time still spoke to Nicol about had basically been completing work they began earlier—aside from Borges and a very few others.
True, he was born in—1899, was it?—and much of his writing appeared before the First Global War. Yet he went on from triumph to triumph until the end of a life rather long for those days.El oro de los tigros was published in the last third of the twentieth century.
How could that be?
Impulse grabbed. Here Nicol was, in Borges’s Argentine, with a full-capability quivira on hand and enough credit to pay for whatever special service would be required. Why not? He might, he just might, learn something that would help him. At the least, instead of futilely brooding, he ought to get some hours worthy of the past several.
He sought out the manager, who exclaimed in surprise, “You wish to use it, senor? Why, may I ask? Hardly anyone goes to a quivira any more, when dreamboxes are everywhere.”
“I know,” said Nicol. “But a dreambox can only draw on the standard programs.”
“The selection is huge, senor. I do not know how many millions of different milieus and situations you can choose from.”
“Still, I suspect they don’t contain exactly what I want. A quivira is equipped to work with the cybercosm and produce a new one. Don’t worry, this is nothing perverse.” Nicol laughed. “I agree, it’s probably impossible to invent anything along those lines that isn’t already available. Basically, I want to meet a man who died hundreds of years ago.”
That was a common desire, and simulations of historic figures were activated every day in dreamboxes around the world. Nicol simply doubted that Borges was among them. How many today had heard of, let alone read, him? Quite apart from changes in language, those subtle, elegiac lines were altogether alien to an age wherein the boundaries he knew, between nature and artifice, organic and inorganic, life and death, were no more.
Nicol felt alien too.
The manager shrugged, led him down hushed corridors, and unsecured a door for him. The suite beyond was heavy with antique elegance. Quiviras in their heyday were not exclusively resorts for pseudo-events; they were small centers for real-time relaxation and indulgence, for discreet rendezvous and confidential talk. Nicol believed that more than the development of inexpensive, easily operated equipment had made them obsolete. Societies themselves had mutated.
He settled down at the main control board. His childhood in space had left him with computer skills superior to the average, and the u
nit helped him when he encountered problems. Soon he was in touch with a high-order sophotect. No, it informed him, a Borges program did not exist. Yes, one could be prepared. The charge would be stiff, especially since he wanted the job done quickly— which meant mobilizing considerable resources, to scan the databases of the world and from their information synthesize a personality and setting, all in about an hour—but it was in the range of what he could afford. Roaming in modest style, he spent his citizen’s credit less fast than it was issued him.
Was the machine mind giving him a break because it was interested in the project and in seeing what would happen?
Waiting for his excursion to be ready, he went to his room and took a detoxer. Alcohol purged from his system, he came back alert and eager. The manager had summoned a live attendant who, hastily briefed, helped him disrobe, fitted the helmet to his head and the connections to his skin, and led him into the bath. He felt a trifle irritated; a modern dreambox didn’t require a second party. Mastering the emotion, he lay down in the tank. The fluid rose around him, took on his mean density and skin temperature, became a sensationless womb where he floated blind and deaf. The circuits began sending their gentle pulses into his brain and he slipped away toward sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream— But no, he thought, rehearsing the obvious to himself as people may when wakefulness is departing. Not true sleep, not passive and chaotic dreaming. The program was interactive. Within its broad limits, it would respond to whatever he did and said in his mind like the real world and real persons responding to his material body. Not in real time, of course; in an hour by the clock he might well experience several subjective hours. Afterward they would be in his memory exactly the same as all others, nothing but logic to tell him these events had been imaginary.
Were they? Their effects on his neurons would be no different. And how real is a poem or a snatch of music?
Down and down.
Out, into bright sunshine on an enormously broad and racketing street.
First he looked at himself. He wore the awkward, uncomfortable garb of the twentieth century, jacket over a shirt and necktie dangling under his throat. Buenos Aires in this period was a dressy city. The air was mild, but foul with the fumes of internal-combustion cars. They crowded the pavement between high, handsome buildings, as pedestrians did the walkways alongside. Folk generally seemed prosperous and cheerful.
Nicol wondered about that. The program immediately informed him. It felt as if he were recalling material he had personally studied. Yes, Argentina in Borges’s last years went through some savage times. However, he had lived to see a fair measure of democracy established and a new hopefulness. Probably the program was showing this symbolically, Nicol decided. The cybercosm wouldn’t simulate more than his purpose required. This was not the Avenida 9 de Julio on which he stood; these were not human beings around him; it was all a shadow show intended only to give him an idea of the environment. If he strayed off a straight course to his goal, he would come into empty streets and then into a blankness from which he would abruptly rouse in his tank.
A shiver passed through him. He almost wished he had not elected to remain aware that this was in fact a pseudo-world.
Concrete hard beneath his feet, chemical reek in his nostrils, rumble and clatter and voices in his ears, gave reassurance. He strode ahead.
At the imposing building on Calle Mexico that housed the Central Library, he met no difficulty. He spoke the contemporary language fluently, or had the illusion he did, which amounted to the same thing. A three-dimensional shadow said he was expected and conducted him to the director. That post was basically honorary, but when
Borges held it he had fallen into the habit of using the office in the mornings, dictating stories and poems, before going home to work with his translator into Anglo—into English. Nicol’s heart fluttered as he was ushered in. The door closed softly at his back.
The old blind man behind the desk heard and rose, offering his hand, as courteous as every true aristocrat. A smile brought the plain, somewhat heavy face totally alive. “Welcome,” he bade. “It is always a pleasure to meet an American. I have never had times more marvelous, or been more kindly treated, than in your country. Please be seated. Shall I ring for coffee?”
He resumed his own chair, still smiling, among the books he had so loved, now forever closed to his eyes. As the minutes passed, as he talked warmly, wittily, wisely, it grew more and more hard for Nicol to comprehend that he was not in the presence of the mortal Jorge Luis Borges.
What difference, anyhow? When the cybercosm wrote this program, it took into account everything recorded about the man, his life, friends, loves, environs and their history, above all his works. The program behaved, it reacted and spoke to Nicol’s mind, just as if it had in fact written Ficciones and Elogio de la sombra and—and it could not write what else Borges wrote after this date, but how vividly it talked, gestured, radiated intellect and goodwill.
Among its data was the pseudo-fact that Nicol was a young man from that nation known as the United States of America, recommended to Borges by an associate he had had while at Harvard University. The program seemed relieved that the visitor wanted less to discuss the works as such than the enigma of creativity, its well-springs, what nourished and what withered it.
No, Nicol thought, forget that this is only an engineered dream, an artifact of the cybercosm interacting with what goes on in my brain. To all momentary intents and purposes, I am here and now with him. Let me gather as much as I can of his insights.
The conversation stayed with him for the rest of his days, but he never mentioned it to anyone else. It was his private possession, a part of his inmost self. On that account, it often struck more deeply than he could admit. Borges would have had no way of knowing what hurt the other or seeing it on him.
“—the symbols of a society, do they hold its soul within them? No New England churchyard, nor Arlington Cemetery, stands in your mind for quite what La Recoleta does in mine. I think that is a major reason we cannot foretell the future. We can perhaps guess at its technology, a little, and a little less at how that technology will touch daily life, but we cannot know what it will mean.”
Cold lightning went up Nicol’s spine. “Maybe you could, sir,” burst from him.
“I? Hardly.”
“You . . . you’ve dealt with strangeness, better than anyone else, I think, and the future is very strange. You might see the heart of it, the thing that can’t be spoken but that everything is about.”
Borges raised his brows. “I do not believe so. I would not have lived in it. In any case, first we require a history of that which has not yet happened.”
“Allow me, please allow me,” Nicol said desperately. “A whim, a wild fancy, whatever you like, but, but important to me. Imagine I’m a time traveler come back, who can tell you that history, tell you what it’s like up there. Then tell me what you might write if that was your period.”
Borges sat silent for a span, until he answered low, “You overestimate me, I fear. I have attempted nothing as fanciful as this. But I hear that it matters to you. Therefore, say on, because you are my guest.”
Nicol drew breath and plunged.
Afterward he recalled that part of the day the least clearly. He had no plan, no ordered arrangement of facts to present. At first he floundered about, scrambling everything together, spaceflight, nanotechnology, psycho-netics, wars, revolutions, new species of beast and man, helter-skelter from his lips. But after a while Borges said, “This is very interesting. You seem to have invented a world as complete as Tolkien’s. Let us explore it.” He began to ask questions. And things to come took shape for the blind man.
Or so the illusion went. What the words might have signified to the living Borges, Nicol could never know. Anything at all, other than an elaborate fantasy? Trying to guess, he stepped mentally aside from what he had related and looked at it for a second as objectively as he was able.
* * * *
Humans did not get into space to stay until the cost of launch was brought down to a reasonable figure. This was done largely by a private corporation, Fireball Enterprises, which for a long while thereafter took the lead in activity beyond Earth. Growing immensely powerful, it nevertheless did not “degenerate into a government,” as its founder Anson Guthrie was wont to say, because he remained at the helm.
There were sound economic reasons for colonizing the Moon, but it turned out that women could not bring babies to term in the low gravity. Genetic engineering produced the race of Lunarians, to whom the conditions were natural. What nobody expected was that they would differ even more in temperament than in body from the Terran stock that gave rise to them. As their first generations matured, friction worsened between the two species.
The age was cruel as well as brilliant. Not only did genetic engineering bring forth many useful new life-forms, the experiments of certain governments led to several other human breeds, who became pathetic misfits. A byproduct of this research were the Keiki Moana, intelligent monk seals, whom Fireball finally took under its protection. All living things that were the result of such technology were known as metamorphs.
Harvest the Fire - [Harvest of Stars 03] Page 1