Harvest of Stars (17 page)

Kyra yielded, and spent the rest of a miserable night waiting for her train. The itinerary she’d laid out with the aid of her informant wasn’t the most direct, involving two changes, but it avoided major stations. They couldn’t microwatch every damn secondary depot between Québec and México, could they? The third stage ended in Portland, which was dicey at best. However, it stopped earlier in Salem, on the fringe of the integrate, and she’d get off there.

Once aboard for the beginning of her trip, she collapsed into sleep more sound than she had expected. She’d had worse beds than this seat; it even reclined a bit. The maglev ran smoothly, soothingly.

She woke to thirst and hunger, blinked, and peered out the window. The countryside through which she fled stretched wide, with occasional hills and bottomlands, flattening toward the plains farther west. It was nearly treeless but intensely green, planted row upon row upon row. She wasn’t sure of the crop, whether those tall stalks were gened for growing food or chemicals. A grid of irrigation pipes gleamed through their ranks. At a distance she glimpsed a couple of machines, perhaps monitoring, perhaps manipulating. Above the horizon the towers of a minor city thrust into a cloudless, birdless heaven.

“Where are we?” she wondered aloud.

“Let me out and I’ll see,” rumbled Guthrie from his sack. She hadn’t dared leave him exposed while she was unconscious. “Right now, my environment’s as deprived as the inside of a politician’s head. I thought you’d snore forever.”

Kyra made sure the door of the compartment was locked, lowered a tray table, and set him on it. Meanwhile she couldn’t help flushing and retorting, “I don’t snore.”

“On what authority do you claim so? Never mind, that’s none of my business. Actually it was just a small snort now and then, ladylike—kind of sexy, in fact.”

You old goat! she almost said, but curbed herself. That might have wounded. “Bueno, where are we?”

He looked. “Indiana or Illinois, I’d guess. … Don’t mean anything to you? This was a federal republic once.

People were the richer for having something closer to them than the national capital. Well, set the time on your tipster back an hour.”

“How are you doing, sir?”

“My battery’s holding out. I daresay you could use a recharge, though, not to mention other needs of nature. Go to ’em. Uh, first check for a newscast, will you?”

The multi scarcely rated the name, being a tiny flatscreen and a single speaker, but when Kyra called up the listings, she found there would be info service in twenty minutes, and left Guthrie watching that channel. At the moment it presented, for classrooms, a review of earlier thinkers who preceded Xuan. Kyra had met them in her own education, political scientists tracing clear back to overrated Plato and much-maligned Machiavelli, systematist historians such as Spengler and Toynbee, psychologists from Pavlov onward who studied mind in the laboratory as a function of the organism, Moravec and Tipler and the other cybernetic visionaries. This program was banalities, pictures and phrases from which official repetition had leached meaning. “Brilliant men,” Guthrie growled. “Honest men. They gave the world treasures. Hell, Xuan himself came up with some good ideas. Not their fault their work got perverted. I daresay Jesus and Jefferson sympathize.”

Kyra relocked the door behind her and made her way down the aisle beyond. It stank of the passengers who crowded it and filled every seat. The train purred along swift and steady, but its interior was begrimed, blotted, defaced in places, metal tarnished, upholstery worn thin or ripped, nothing much to do with what it had formerly been or what you rode in most countries. She waited seventeen minutes in line for a closet where the smell was worse and the wash water a trickle, with a sign warning it was not potable.

The line at the vendor was longer yet, but moved at a reasonable rate. The machine declared itself out of most items on its menu. She obtained coffee of sorts, a calcium-protein drink, soy hash, toast, and fake honey, and bore them back, shoving somewhat rudely in her eagerness.

The recintito might be little more than a wall around a couple of seats, but it gave privacy, which for the average person on Earth was a luxury comparable to live-animal meat, a visit to a forest, or a … a printed book, paper spotted and fragrant with age. Of course, a larger compartment would have been pleasant, but Lee had warned against attention-drawing comforts.

Lee—Abruptly heart and foot stumbled. She almost dropped her tray.

No, it wasn’t he, the man in the aisle seat, not at all like him. But oh, for an instant she’d thought it was Ivar Stranding. Same slenderness, same clear features and blond hair. … No, not really.

She pushed on, full of swear words aimed at the turmoil within her. What kind of lepton was she, anyway? More than two years had slipped by since they broke up. And it hadn’t been that cracking serious in the three years before, though it had felt so and they’d dreamed of permanence and children and all the rest. How could it be serious between a space pilot and an engineer in the asteroids? How often did you get together, for how long at a time? Expensive multi messages lasered across the megaklicks, plus whatever other substitutes and consolations technology could provide, only made matters worse in the long run. She started turning elsewhere as chance afforded, and not just to good friends whom she hadn’t wanted to hurt by unheralded refusals. No doubt Ivar did likewise. For he could never qualify to become her partner in faring, and she could not-would not-quit her ship to be always with him. Work among the flying mountains had its challenges, yes, but it wasn’t the Long Road, it wasn’t Earth aglow over Copernicus’ ringwall or bearding Jupiter in his radiation den or a comet no life had ever betrodden before or tales and songs and fellowship at rendezvous—

Kyra snapped the memories off. Surprise had raised them, she told herself. And she’d been vulnerable because in this splintery situation with Guthrie, she was starved for anything gentle, peaceful, secure. Which it never had been with Ivar, aside from those brief spans after making love.

Eiko Tamura, now, aloft in L-5. No doubt Eiko had her troubles, but her spirit seemed to dwell apart from them, for how could serenity like hers be pretense? Kyra had once sent her an attempt at a poem,

Gone sunset amberful, the lake

Lies mirror-quiet for the pines

That ring it round with shadow heights

Through which a ghost of golden shines

To burnish blue those metal bits

Above the water, wing and wing
,

Where, silent as in space itself

Three dragonflies are cometing
.

but never mentioned that it was Eiko she had in mind.

The recintito welcomed her. She pressed thumb to lock and followed hard behind as the door swung aside, kicking it shut while her gaze jumped to the video screen. She’d missed the first of the newscast, but—

Again she nearly lost her tray.

The image was of a man big and burly, middle-aged, his broad blunt face creased and weathered, with light-blue eyes under bushy brows and thinning reddish hair. His shirt was open on a shaggy chest, beneath the jacket of an undress uniform that Fireball had not employed for generations. She knew him, she had seen this same electronic configuration fifty times if she had seen it once, and the bass tones had last tramped across her eardrums half an hour ago. “—I came to North America in my own fashion, which we needn’t describe, to observe for myself and do whatever I figured was called for. What I found rocked me back.”

Kyra’s look swung to Guthrie in his box. He brought an eyestalk momentarily down across his speaker.
Be quiet.
Numbly, she lowered herself to a seat.

“I’ll go into detail later, when I issue a full statement,” said the simulacrum of Anson Guthrie as he had been when first he became famous. It was the appearance he generated for his annual Christmas greetings to Fireball’s consortes and his infrequent public pronouncements.

“That’ll probably be in a few days, after I’ve returned to the main offices in Quito and had a chance to confer in depth with my top directors. Meanwhile, though, I’ve been asked to make some remarks in support of the measures you’ve heard about. I don’t mind obliging.”

His mouth drew upward, a sardonic smile. “Well, actually, I do mind, sort of. I’ve not suddenly been converted to Xuanism or any such fool thing. But I have become satisfied that there is a real danger, clear and present. A few desperados who’ve worked their way in till they’ve got access to the key networks and the powerful machineries—they can unloose forces like a major meteoroid strike.”

A well-chosen figure of speech, Kyra thought. Everybody these days was aware of the threat in space, unlikely but unbounded, and was glad that Fireball held the World Federation contract to patrol and prevent. Which was suddenly a bit ironic, wasn’t it?

“Sure, I favor liberty. I’ve often spouted off to that effect. But my friends have also heard me say social revolution is no way to get it. They tried that in France, 1789, Russia, 1917—why go on? The government of the North American Union is capable of reforming itself. I doubt that a martial-law regime would be, which’d follow twenty or thirty million deaths. Anyhow, I wouldn’t want those deaths on my conscience. Would you? Some of you may have read what I used to reply to the really vehement advocates of population reduction, back when it looked as though the growth curve never would level off. ‘You’re right,’ I’d say. ‘The planet is grossly overpopulated and we’d better do something about it. Do you want to machine-gun the surplus yourself, or shall we start with you?’ Back then, I was also in favor of ecology, mother love, and apple pie, but had no use for the eco-fascists. I’m in favor of liberty now, but have no use for the liberation fascists.”

Kyra didn’t recognize the last word. Guthrie was apt to throw in archaisms when he made a speech, and to ramble a bit.

Sternness: “You have had the danger described for you,
the extent of infiltration by fanatical conspirators. Later I’ll explain how I know this is true, not propaganda. Right now I haven’t the time. Neither does anybody else. We’ve got to cope, prontito. I order Fireball Enterprises to cooperate fully with the government of North America in its necessary, temporary steps to deal with this emergency. I urge and I will urge all others to do the same.”

The image smiled afresh. “As for the good news, I repeat, these measures are temporary. Meanwhile, let me say, while I’ve got your buttonhole and free time on the air, let me say that the people who convinced me are not the hard-line Avantists, not the dinosaur faction. They’re the moderates, who understand that if the system isn’t mended it will be ended, by falling apart if nothing else. Our cooperation will strengthen them against their opponents. That’s why I decided to come out of hiding, and it’s paid off. Details later, from Quito. I do believe the occupation of our facilities can be finished inside a month, and regular operations can resume in spite of it in a week or two.

“To everybody of good will and common sense, gracias for your patience. Adiós.”

The image blanked. A spokeswoman came on. “You have just seen Anson Guthrie, cacique of Fireball Enterprises—”

“Turn it off,” said Guthrie. “The rest will be standard-issue pablum.”

Kyra did. “That was … really your other self, jefe?” she whispered. “Or an electronic job?”

“Naw. A smart program that studied my recorded ’casts could’ve put it on, but they’ll have to do more than that to make it effective. My double must in fact have been speaking, and will in fact go to Quito, to take charge of the company.”

Kyra shook her head. “How can he possibly? He was inactive for the past twenty-some years.” She drew breath. “Muy bien, they could force-feed the history into his memory, but the material that was kept confidential, the countless little personal details—”

“Yeah, it’s a gamble, but he obviously expects he can
bluff his way through.” Guthrie’s gaze went outward. His voice became the sound of distant surf. “I think
I
could pull it off, if my copy didn’t show up. Judas priest, what an all-time crapshoot! I damn near envy him.”

“And if he fails,” Kyra knew bleakly, “the Avantists won’t have lost much.”

“Right. A little embarrassment, maybe, but governments work on the crony system. None leans too hard on any other unless it actively threatens the peace or the general environment. North America will insist it was preventing a disaster, however misguided the efforts of a few officials were. Meanwhile it’ll have reaped the benefits of buddy-buddy relationships with Fireball, which this wretched economy needs the way a leaky spaceship needs air. The company can’t rescind that, not punish the prank very heavily. A boycott, for instance, is impractical. If nothing else, other countries would just resell to North America, and we’d have their hostility too.

“Of course,” Guthrie added, “if anti-me really can quell me without publicity, and not give himself away by some major flub, the Avantists have won. Or so they’ll believe. It’ll take him time, converting Fireball to an active political force, but he’ll have time. Whether he succeeds or not, God knows what the end result will be.”

He glanced at Kyra. “Don’t let your food get cold, gal,” he advised, “especially not your coffee. How well I remember.”

She heeded. Despite everything, her body, schooled to resilience, welcomed the nourishment. Emotions stabilizing, she could ask, “What was the official announcement?”

“What anti-me sketched. Discovery that extremists have infiltrated the state apparatus, Fireball, other organizations, hell, everything in sight. Nothing too specific, but alarming. Vaguely described terrors are the worst anyway. Action against them—you want the list?”

“Uh-huh,” said Kyra around a mouthful of food.

“Well, you know about the occupation of our facilities. I recall your guessing there’d be radical security measures at the airports. You were right. The smaller ones are shut down, pending close control. No private aircraft will leave
North America without prior inspection and a permit. Satellites and aerostats can monitor that, you know.