Harvest of Stars (33 page)

“Crack!” she muttered. “Come off that, will you?” It wasn’t the first time she must ram this depression away from her. Pilots did still have genuine tasks, like engineers, prospectors, scientists, artists, entrepreneurs. They made the basic decisions. Their hands and voices gave the commands that mattered. When the universe suddenly threw something at them out of its boundless reservoir of unknownness, theirs was the imagination or intuition or hunch that might save lives and, yes, machines. Wasn’t her body as automatic, as self-guiding, as a ship or a robot? Yet it was the servant of her mind.

But once the machines had, fully, their own minds—which looked like being soon—No, she would not dwell on it. She had work to do.

She returned to Guthrie. “Launch time’s earlier than I expected, jefe,” she said. “Let’s get you snugged down.”

“Okay.” What feelings lay behind that flat word? Did any? Yes, she insisted, yes.

She took him aft. The launcher was not much more than a solid-fuel rocket with a basic autopilot and a bay for small cargo. It would take three days to come near L-5. Their prime hope was that meanwhile Kyra would have informed humankind, so that the true Guthrie would arrive not as a fugitive but as a conqueror.

She connected the launcher’s computer to the ship’s. While the calculated parameters were being downloaded, she laid Guthrie in and made him secure. The machines would take care of everything else.

“You may as well go to your quarters now and relax,” he suggested. “Why hang around for the next ten minutes wondering what to say? ‘Have a nice trip.’ ‘Gracias, you have a nice time too.’ ‘Say hello to everybody.’ ‘Of course I will.’” He fashioned a laugh. “That was how my wife
quoted it, with the most adenoidal accent she could produce. When one of us was going somewhere alone, we’d swap a scandalously big kiss in the terminal and whoever was staying home would leave.”

He understood. Kyra made a laugh to give back to him. “Muy bien, jefe. Hasta la vista. And—” Hovering over him, she laid hold of his case, pulled herself down, and kissed the cold hardness between the eyestalks. “Buen viaje. To both of us.”

As she went out, she heard the cover slide into place over the cargo bay.

Cherry blossoms white—

Sunset colorless, breath-quick—

Stars hastening, cold
.

E
IKO
T
AMURA SHOOK
her head, sighed, and laid the paper down. The haiku had not yet come right. It remained words, with scant feel in them of what she had hoped to call forth, the day and night of a whirligig spin betokening the evanescence of life, an artificial springtime a symbol of how small and fragile great Ragaranji-Go really was. Perhaps it would never find its true voice, and end in the recycler. Most of her poems did.

This one, though, troubled her more. It had arisen from a deeper need. The news in these past several days, and then the sudden direness in her father, locked away from her behind his face, made her reach once again for the eternal. Calm and consolation lay in understanding that humanity is the slightest of ripples over it; and from them could arise the strength to deal with human griefs; but she renewed that understanding by giving it utterance. Now she seemed unable to. Anxiety gnawed so sharply.

She raised her head to look at the scroll above. In its ink painting of a mountainscape and its calligraphy, certain lines by Tu Fu, she found serenity oftener than in any scene played on the multiceiver or any virtuality experienced with a vivifer. Today it likewise was just marks on paper. Her gaze flitted around the room as if seeking escape.

She had more space here than was usual in the colony, having enlarged it after the last of her siblings departed, but mainly it was space, occupied by little more than this table where she wrote, a dresser, a cabinet, and the futon on which she slept. A shelf held a few objects: a seashell from Earth, a glittery piece of comet rock given her by Kyra Davis, old books, her bamboo flute. For her extensive reading and music listening she had the world’s databases to draw on, and for mementos she had her memory.

Through the thin walls she heard a door open and shut. Feet walked slowly. That must be her father, home late. She rose and hurried across the tatami out to the common room to greet him.

Noboru Tamura stood in his dark clothes like a blot. Ordinarily one saw past small stature, bald head, furrowed countenance, to the chief of space operations in L-5, the friend of Anson Guthrie himself. Today his shoulders were stooped and his hands faintly trembled. Compassion and concern rushed over Eiko, not for the first time since her mother’s death. She bowed to him—in a crowded shell where survival required universal self-discipline, courtesy was less a set of rituals than it was a necessity—but thereafter she went to take both those hands in hers and ask low, “What is wrong? I wish you would tell me, Father.”

“I wish I dared,” he answered.

She let go. “Why not? Always before, you have honored me with your trust.”

He glanced away from her. “This knowledge is dangerous, and you could make no use of it.”

“Please sit down and rest,” she urged. “Let me bring you some refreshment.”

He nodded and sank onto a cushion. Though they had chairs for visitors, both preferred traditional—no, archaic—ways when possible. Many in the colony did. Eiko supposed it was, at heart, a kind of defiance. Behold us, you stars; we remain the children of Gaia, and so does this tiny world we have created.

To make tea in the kitchen brought a similar comfort. She had never permitted herself to think of her home as empty. Instead, her mind evoked the clatter and laughter that filled it before the children grew up and left; or it might be her mother’s soft tones, or Kioshi murmuring in her ear during a stolen moment—Not that. In the end, Kioshi Matsumoto had married another girl, and may all be well with them. Eiko had her father to look after.

She arranged pot, cups, and cakes pleasingly on a tray, brought it in, and settled down opposite him. A smile crinkled his weariness. “You are a good daughter,” he said. “Praise to Amida Buddha.” For a while they were silent, contemplating. Though not a real tea ceremony, it gave restoration to spirit as well as body.

“I have been alone this whole daywatch, and tuned nothing in,” she ventured at length. That was true. She had taken leave from her programming job in his department, because she felt the stress of wondering what would erupt next between the company and the Union government, together with the general disarray among the staff, precluded her doing honestly creative work there. “Has something happened that I should know about?”

He showed surprise. “You haven’t heard?” A shrug, a wryness. “That’s my Eiko.” He went bleak. “A detachment of North American Security Police has arrived by torchcraft. We are under martial law.”

The words hit like a knife. She dropped her cup and barely caught it. Coriolis force splashed several drops onto her kimono. “What? But—but, Father, we are not of their country. We are in space. We are
Fireball.”

“This is by agreement with our directorate.”

“With Guthrie-san?” Dream-gibberish.

“Yes. He informed us personally, yesterday. We were to
keep it confidential until it was accomplished, for fear of public unrest.”

A fear well justified, Eiko thought, considering the Opinion of Avantism held by most people here. “Is that what has been preying on your mind?” she asked.

“It was,” he replied carefully. “If the situation was in truth that desperate—You know how vulnerable we are.”

“It was,” he had said. Eiko wondered whether to hear that as an invitation. A burden borne alone is twice heavy. Yet she ought not alarm him by rushing in. She took a sip of tea. The heat and metallic-green savor were heartening. “What will they do, those officers?”

“Whatever they must, they told us. We are ordered to cooperate. Their captain promised they will try not to disrupt anything of ours. I left them at the quarters we have appropriated.”

“But it is not that simple, really, is it?” Eiko slipped at him.

“No,” he yielded. “Strange enough that Guthrie-san would … panic. Have we not plenty of loyal, able folk among us whom we could alert to watch out for saboteurs? Has the company ever before kept us in the dark? Well, maybe this emergency is unique.”

“You cannot quite believe that, can you?” she pursued.

He surrendered altogether. “No longer. I should keep it secret, even from you—especially from you, my dear—but—” He straightened. His voice grew firm. “Yesterday too, some hours after we were told to expect the police, I received a lasergram addressed to me personally in my office. It appeared to be a routine memorandum, but the signature informed me that the real message was encrypted within it and came from Guthrie-san or a highly trusted agent of his. He takes what he calls ‘just in case’ precautions, you know, such as preparing this clandestine means of communication. I did not sleep much last nightwatch.”

Her pulse lurched. “What did it say?”

“It could be no more than a few words long, or a monitor might well suspect something beneath the surface.”
They must be wired into him by now, the way he recited: “Secret launcher approaches 23.”

“What can that mean?”

He smiled, a grimace. “I have considered it. ‘Secret.’ That must include, above all, secret from the occupation force. ‘Launcher approaches.’ A spaceship could never come anywhere near us undetected, of course, but if no special watch is kept, a launch rocket falling free would not be noticed, except by an unlikely chance, until it got within about a thousand kilometers.”

At least, if it wasn’t on a collision orbit, Eiko realized. A bit of rock or junk that was to pass harmlessly by would register at a considerable, distance, but attract no attention, no curiosity; such objects were too many. “Approach.” The launcher would be traveling cold, on a trajectory that could only be guessed. However, the guess might be shrewd …

“The number twenty-three must be a date, and of this month,” Tamura continued. “That means daywatch after tomorrow. Assuming neither the launcher nor its mother ship have special capabilities, this implies—I ran a computation—it left the ship in the vicinity of Earth, the ship probably being bound for Luna.”

“What … is it … carrying?”

“I do not know. But this does not accord well with the story and the commands we have received from Quito, does it?”

Eiko considered her father’s face. It had become a samurai mask. She must fight to speak: “Do you mean to have it intercepted and its contents brought in?”

“What else? I am thinking how to do that unbeknownst. You are well-informed about our operations, and better acquainted with various of our personnel than I am. I welcome any ideas that occur to you.” Sternly: “But this shall not pass from you to anyone else, nor shall you do anything except help me plan. Is that clear?”

“I can do more,” she protested. “Yes, in space itself. Perhaps better than others. You will surely be watched, but who would pay attention to me?”

Who indeed? she thought. A short, thin, plain-featured
maiden lady of quiet manners, white streaks in the hair bespeaking her forty-two years. … Ragaranji-Go was too huge to monitor closely. Workers were always bound in or out, inspections, maintenance, flits to unmanned spacecraft that had cargo to offload but would not actually dock. The—Sepo, was that what the North Americans called them?—would naturally try to control all activity, make certain that each exit or entry was on a definite, ordinary task. Nevertheless, a person who wasn’t expected and who knew her way around might well be able to slip past unobserved. Harder would be to return likewise. Still, with certain prearrangements—

“No!” exclaimed Tamura. “It is not your risk to take. I gave troth, but you did not. Your obligations are to your home.”

Pain twisted in Eiko. He had never said outright why he had discouraged her from the ceremony, but she knew. His oldest son underwent it, and Fireball’s executives had no doubt made every effort to find satisfying, meaningful work for Jutaro. Nothing that would challenge his particular talents remained that a machine was not already handling. Jutaro was on Earth these days, subsisting on citizen’s credit, doing odd jobs—some pettily criminal, she suspected—to earn the price of repeated admission to a quivira.

Noboru Tamura would keep the faith he had plighted. He did not want more of his children thus bound to a way of life he saw as doomed. Eiko did not want him hurt further.

He managed a smile with a bit of warmth in it. “After all,” he said, “I keep my hopes that you too will eventually give me a grandchild.”

There was still time for that, she kept scrupulously to her biomedical program, but the time was dwindling—faster and faster, it seemed.

The door trilled. A neighbor, a friend? Eiko rose. She would welcome a caller, anyone who might ease the tension between her and her father. Perhaps he felt the same, for he moved ahead and himself admitted the newcomers.

They were three men unknown to her, in tan uniforms with shock guns at their hips. Armbands displayed the infinity symbol. They came straight through. The last one closed the door.

Eiko’s heart ticked away the while in which Tamura stood motionless before he said most softly, in English, “Good evenwatch, Captain Pedraza and gentlemen. To what do we owe this visit?”

The leader saluted. “Good evening, Sr. Tamura and señorita.” Below the politeness, Eiko heard steel. “My apologies for this interruption. We’ve received new orders. Further information about terrorist activities suggests your life may well be in danger, sir. We are to protect you and certain other persons till the danger is past.”

“Indeed?” Tamura murmured. “What if I decline your kind offer?”

Eiko foreknew the answer: “I’m afraid we must insist, sir. Surely you can imagine how an attempt on you, in this environment, could lead to a terrible loss of life among innocent bystanders. Por favor, pack what you’ll need for the next few days and come along. You’ll have safe, comfortable lodging and open lines for communicating with anybody you wish.”