Harvest of Stars (3 page)

“Packer had just gotten word. He didn’t say where from, but prob’ly it was a mole in the Security Police. Whether a Chaotic or an agent of ours, I don’t know. The government’s planning a second stage of crackdown on us. Within the next two or three days, they’ll take over everything. And it seems they’ve learned the jefe is on hand. They have a list of half a dozen places where he may very well be.

“Packer was able to retrieve that list from our cryptofile. Of course, he’d been careful not to know, himself, where Guthrie was hiding. His information didn’t include how to access safe lines to those places, so he dared not phone them. The best he could do was send one of us to each.

“Us—I mean, we were that number of persons out of those who happened to be on hand. I’m a pilot myself. We were also ones he figured he could rely on, and who could leave the port without it seeming particularly suspicious to the watchers outside, and soon return looking just as natural. Whoever finds Guthrie is to carry him back, so he can be put in a spacecraft and sent out of reach before the Avantists are there to stop it.

“Bueno, is he here?”

Kyra stopped, out of breath, faintly dizzy. Had she really needed to go on at such length?

Lee’s gaze stabbed at her. “God damn,” he murmured, “you
are
genuine.” And: “Yes. This way.”

The words hit like a thunderclap. Then suddenly she was altogether alert and cool. It felt as if a singing went through her bones, but every sense was opened full, the universe grew supernaturally vivid, while her mind sprang. Thus had she felt before when her life came to depend on nothing but herself, once in a boat wreck on a surf-swept Pacific reef, more than once in space.

Lee brought her to another room, where he had his bed, a closet and dresser, a desk and some hobby material. He played with model aircraft, she saw. A half-finished historical piece, skeletal biplane, wistful centuries-old memory of days when humans flew in machines they could build with their hands, effused a tang of glue. A viewscreen was tuned to a nature reserve—the North Woods, Kyra guessed fleetingly, for the well-ordered, well-tended trees were conifers, and canoes glided over the water behind them. Only a few people were in sight, but background noise indicated a campsite was close by. Not that a campsite was ever far away, in any such area.

The irrelevancy evaporated. Lee was saying: “He stays out of the circuits except when he’s in contact with his officers. Those lines are tap-proof, we hope, but why take unnecessary chances? Otherwise he’s in a hidden, shielded safe. He had it installed by the first agent of his who rented this apartment, which was decades ago, I reckon. He can look out, listen, call me by voice, and of course I can provide him with whatever material he wants for information or pasatiempo.”

Curiosity flickered in Kyra. What did Guthrie enjoy hearing, reading, watching, vivifying, after more than a hundred years as a wraith in a box? His personal style kept the earthiness recorded during his mortal existence, but maybe that was a fake, a public relations ploy. …

Lee halted before a flatscreen. Like those in the living room, the image it projected was not in motion. Full face, a man’s head and shoulders—that haircut and high-collared tunic went out of style generations ago, the subject must be somebody Guthrie had liked or admired or—Wait! She’d seen him in a history show, hadn’t she? Mamoru Tamura, the mayor who guided L-5 through its first great crisis—

Lee saluted. “Emergency, sir.” Now that action was upon him, he had lost his own hesitancies. “Pilot Kyra Davis brings news from Director Packer. The government’s preparing a raid. We’d better get you out of here.”

“Judas priest!” exploded a rough basso. “Move!”

Lee touched the ornate frame at certain points. The
entire unit swung aside. Was it a dummy? Had Guthrie watched through the portrait’s eyes, heard with its ears, as he almost seemed to speak with its lips? The space behind held an object. Lee reached in, detached it from a portable terminal, and brought it forth.

“You take him, consorte,” he said. “Explain the situation while I get a bag or something to carry him in.”

Kyra held out her hands. The weight that descended into them was oddly little, two or three kilos. Shouldn’t the founder and captain of Fireball mass more? His undertakings ranged from end to end of the Solar System and on toward the stars. The person, the mind that had been copied into this program, it had itself—no, he had himself—fared the whole way to Alpha of the Centaur and back. Surely there must be more to him than this.

But no. A human brain held less material.

And ghost-Guthrie required no complete brain. A neural network equivalent to a cerebral cortex. Sensory centers capable of handling electronic, magnetic, photonic inputs. Motor centers capable of outputs into control devices. A memory unit. Software encoding what he was. Maybe a bit more than that. Kyra didn’t know; psychonetics wasn’t her field. But not much more, surely. Otherwise, the rest of what she held was instrumentation, minimal auxiliary apparatus, a battery, a case.

The whole of what she held was her liege lord. They had never before met, but he it was to whom she had ultimately given her troth, and who had given her Fireball’s.

“Sir,” she whispered. “Sir.”

She had seen the case depicted and described, and others like it. (How very few like it.) Yet to confront, to grasp the presence was as overwhelming as had been her first encounters with love and death.

The sheer simplicity became incomprehensible. This was just a box of dark blue organometal, hard, glassy smooth, edges rounded off, seams nearly invisible. Its flat bottom was about twenty by thirty centimeters, with five-millimeter discs set flush to protect several connectors. It rose about another twenty centimeters to a curved top. Two more discs on either side marked additional
connectors. Between each pair a larger circle, four centimeters across, covered the diaphragm that served as an ear. A similar one on the front surface was for the speaker. On that same face—so must she think of it—were two hemispheres, the diameter of the audio caps.

The volume was approximately the same as for a large human head. Anson Guthrie’s? He had been a big man.

The hemispherical shells split and drew back, like eyelids. Two flexible stalks, five or six millimeters thick, emerged. Their ends bulged out in knobs about three centimeters wide. With snakish deliberation they extruded themselves to their full fifteen centimeters and twisted in her direction. From within the knobs, lenses gleamed at her.

“Hey, don’t drop me, girl,” boomed the voice. “Put me down and pick your jaw up off the floor.”

Could a man make jokes after he was dead? Bueno, Guthrie often did, unless that was a calculated pretense. But now, with the hunt on his track? Most carefully, Kyra lowered him to the desk beside the model airplane.

“Okay, brief me,” Guthrie ordered. The synthesized sounds, which could have come from a living throat, bore an accent. She had heard that it was American English as spoken in his youth, and knew he was apt to use expressions from that era.

She rallied her wits and repeated what she had told Lee.

Guthrie shaped a whistle. “Sanamabiche! How the devil—? Yes, we’d better up anchor right away. Good man, Wash. Good lass, you. I won’t forget.”

Lee brought in a daypack. “Will this do?” he asked. Kyra frowned, uncertain. “It won’t draw attention,” he said. “You see them everywhere these days. They leave both hands free.”

She nodded. “Muy bien.”

“You mean you didn’t have something of your own, Davis?” Guthrie growled. “No forethought?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” she replied, stung while acknowledging that the criticism was fair. “We were terribly rushed.”

“And you and Wash and the rest aren’t schooled in
skullduggery. Sure, I understand. Take me and stuff me,” which sounded obscurely like another jape, “and we’ll be off.” The lenses swung toward Lee. “You sit tight. When the cops bust in, be surprised. You don’t know nothin’. Nobody been here but us chickens. Can you do that? They’ll interrogate you, which’ll be no fun, but I don’t expect they’ll deep-quiz, if you give them no cause to suspect you. Are you game?”

Lee stood straight. “Yes, sir.”

“You can run and try to hide if you’d rather. I don’t think it’s a good idea, though. That’ll show them you probably are involved, and they’ll be on your trail with every high-tech sort of bloodhound they’ve got. Chances are they’ll catch you pretty quick. You’re marked, known, registered, identified, forty ways from Sunday, you being a resident citizen of this great free republic. As a member of Fireball, you must have a lot of extra data in your dossier, too. When they’ve run you down, they will squeeze your information out of you, and worry about Fireball’s wrath later. That won’t be nice at all.”

Indeed it wouldn’t be, Kyra thought. Not torture; that could bring trouble with the World Federation, and wasn’t guaranteed effective anyway. Rehabilitative medical care. Chemicals and phased electropulses opened up a mind as a man peels an orange. They often left it in a very similar condition.

“I truly believe your best bet is to stay put and play dumb,” Guthrie finished.

Lee nodded, a spastic jerk. “Yes, sir.”

Guthrie’s tone gentled. “I’m sorry, Bob. Sorrier than I can say. The one solitary excuse I’ve got for skiting off and leaving you is that a lot of people are at hazard.”

And a lot of hopes, Kyra thought.

“I understand,” Lee said, thinly but steadily. “If anybody can balance this skewed-up equation, it’s you. Go.”

The phone chimed. He turned toward the room’s outlet.

“Hold,” Guthrie rapped.

“What?” Lee asked. The phone chimed again.

“Don’t answer.” A lens cocked itself at Kyra. “Davis,
how did you know Bob was at home? You wouldn’t have wanted to hang around waiting for him and getting noticed.”

“I, I called,” Kyra said. “Public booth. When he responded, I broke off.”

“I supposed it was a miscall,” Lee added. The phone chimed. “They happen. I didn’t think any more about it.” The phone chimed.

“That could be a Sepo scout.” Guthrie declared starkly. “They’re mighty quick off the mark when they want to be.”

“Packer said—the mole said—in two or three days,” Kyra stammered.

“That’s what the mole said, whoever he is. How long did it take him to get to someplace where he could halfway safely pass on what he’d learned? How precise was it? Did the main office meanwhile decide to advance the schedule?”

Kyra recalled the officer who boarded the fahrweg. As far as she knew, even nowadays uniformed Security Police weren’t too common a sight anywhere. (Plainclothesmen might be something else.) Had he been on a different assignment, or was he a forerunner?

“They like to case the territory and stake it out good before they make a pinch,” Guthrie went on. “Let’s have a quick reconnaissance of our own. Bob, your big screen can sweep the area.”

The phone fell silent. Lee moved to play whatever message was perhaps being recorded. “Halt!” Guthrie commanded. “They’ll have meters to show you’re doing that, if it is them.”

Lee yanked his hand back. “Right,” he gasped. “I forgot. Yes, you are the jefe.” A world of meaning pulsed in that informal word. He took the case and bore it into the living room. Kyra followed.

They stared at the sky view from the spire. Something glinted high overhead. Lee set Guthrie on a table and operated the controls. Vision sprang upward, magnified, amplified. A lean teardrop poised, black and white, on its jets. Kyra estimated its altitude as three kilometers. From
that distance, with optics less capable than what she routinely used in her spacecraft, you could count ants on the pavement below. She sensed her sweat, acrid and chill.

“Yeah, Sepo,” Guthrie said. “You didn’t get here any too soon, Davis.”

“What can we do?” she heard herself ask.

“Let me think. I’ve studied those cochinos over the years, and I remember others like them in the past, around the globe. Maybe you could still walk out with me and ride off, unmolested. I wouldn’t bet on it, though. Chances are, they’ve already got the gateways watched. By men in civilian dress, naturally.”

Kyra wondered if that had been so when she arrived. Probably. Maybe not. It made no difference, she supposed. They wouldn’t stop every person who went in or out. It would be too laborious. Worse, it could alarm their prey, who might then wipe incriminating data or otherwise inconvenience them. But anybody who emerged looking the least bit suspicious—as it might be, with a bulging sack between her shoulders—would get an instrumental scan. If anything the least bit unusual registered—as it might be, a neural network—that would be that.

Acid burned her gullet.

“Since you haven’t touched the phone, Bob, they’ll assume you’ve stepped out,” Guthrie continued. “They’ll try again in a while. Eventually, of course, whether you answer or not, they’ll come in. Two-three hours from now, maybe. Let’s see what your pals in B-24 will do for us.”

“That may be nothing, you know,” Lee said harshly. “At best, it can’t be much.”

“Beats sitting still, doesn’t it? Come on. Bag me and hit the road. The sooner we leave, the less likely we are to encounter a Sepo along the way.”

“Where to?” asked Kyra. This fragment of hope calmed her belly and turned her heartbeat high.

Lee went to shut the safe and fetch the daypack. “I’ve kept tabs on the occupants of my safe houses,” Guthrie explained meanwhile. “Not to meddle in their private lives, nor in any great detail. Christ knows I’ve had plenty else to keep me busy. But I’d gathered enough that when
Wash Packer’s man left me in my temporary lodgings, it was Bob Lee I signalled, by an innocent-looking message on a computer bulletin board, to come get me. You see, he’d cultivated some folks in this complex who don’t like the Avantists either. That was smart of him, though I suspect he did it mainly because he’s a friendly, outgoing, curious type. Anyway, it decided me on the Blue Theta. Every fox wants two holes to his burrow.”

T
HEY DARED NOT
talk on the fahrweg. As they left it, Lee thrust himself past Kyra, who carried Guthrie, muttering, “Let me go first everywhere. Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.”