Harvest of Stars (37 page)

The wall at her back, she set forth on a trail. At half Earth weight, she moved as easily as the butterflies. The air was thin but she needed less and it was mild and moist, full of living odors. Bougainvillea and poinsettia flared, fantastically tall. A stand of bamboo clicked in the forced breeze. Birds trilled in a plum grove. She crossed a bridge high-arched over a brook that rushed from a hillside, pumped, artificial, but clear and songful. Mostly the terrain was grass and wildflowers. It curved upward before her to meet the illusion of sky.

Another wall hove in view. Its mural showed a classic landscape, cone-shaped mountains above a river and village. A torii arch gave ornament to the gate through it.

On the far side Eiko came to the Tree.

The
Tree. Here the air lay hushed. Light fell in beams or like a mist down into shadow, to speckle a floor of yielding duff, clustered ferns, logs that were fallen, limbs over-grown with moss and mushrooms. Her gaze found no more sky. This space was deckless almost to the spin axis, a shaft half a kilometer across and nearly as deep. In it reigned the Tree.

Sequoia, biological experiment, genes cunningly mutated, growth hastened by chemistry and allowed by weight that dwindled as the crown rose—words. It was like calling Bach’s Passion According to St. John a set of notes scribbled around an account of a myth. She entered into holiness.

Often had she sought here, climbed, rested in the heights, meditated or daydreamed or simply been. Once beyond the lower branches she rarely encountered anyone else. To go higher was reasonably safe if you took care, but a single time sufficed most of those who ever made the effort. Diversions elsewhere—winged flight, a globular pool at the axis, variable-
g
sports and dancing, excursions outside, and more and more—had variety in them. Here were only infinite enigmatic traceries of bark, boughs, needles, wind, cloud. Sometimes a bird or a darting squirrel went by.

She approached. The trunk was a wall, a tower, a fortress, red-brown and rough to see, warm and soft to touch. She rounded its immensity and found the ladder. They who fastened the metal had worked in reverence. It was colored like the bark; rungs and bars and resting stages seemed to belong as much did the lesser plants in the twilight below. Eiko laid hold.

For a moment she paused. She stood alone in a breathing stillness. How fared the brain between her shoulders? She could give him a word or two, a reassurance, a kindness.

No. Not yet. She began climbing.

T
HE SCREEN SHOWED
new Guthrie in a new body. A different one, at any rate. It surely gave him less than half the capabilities he might have, as humanoid as it was. He could almost have been a medieval knight outfitted for tourney. Not much was lacking but plumes on the helmet
and a surcoat adorned with a lion. Sayre wondered if he had adopted it to make himself seem closer to his employees and associates, make them more confident in his leadership on this dubious and troubled day. The imagery might well actually work to that end, not in anyone’s conscious mind but down among emotions, archetypes, the infantile and the animal.

Nevertheless, the tone from that bright visor was chillingly matter-of-fact. “Not a new word so far. Rinndalir’s agents went off with Davis. That’s all.”

Sayre forced the same manner into his response. “Can you guess where?”

“Maybe. I haven’t dealt with him personally, repeatedly, like the other me, remember. I’ve only got updates to go on. But they tell me what a tricky bastard he is. Knowing his location, Davis’, wouldn’t do us a hell of a lot of good. What counts is what he’s doing with her.”

“Two days—She’s certainly told him. Why hasn’t he made it public?”

“I expect he wants to verify, as far as possible. And quite likely sit back a while, collect what more information he can, see what develops and how he can turn it to his advantage. Listen, I’ve put feelers out in his direction. He’ll know I want secret contact with him. I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t oblige. But when, I can’t say, nor what he’ll want. Maybe only to laugh at us.”

Sayre gripped the edge of his desk. “What … do you think … you can offer him?”

Robot shoulders shrugged. The audio carried the faint metal slither of it. “I’ll have to play whatever cards I’m dealt. Bribes, of course. Quid pro quo.”

“Threats? Hinted at, naturally. It would not be impossible to arrange a major accident.”

“Like an unmanned spacecraft crashing where it’d hurt? Not easy. Nor an idea I like. Economic reprisals—likewise. The Moon depends on Fireball, but it’s mutual. Also, do I have to remind you again? My consortes aren’t your trained-dog officers or your castrato taxpayers. They think for themselves. I can’t order them into actions
they’ll wonder about, I have to maneuver them into it, and that takes time.”

Insolent swine. Sayre denied himself anger. It wasn’t rational. “Bueno,” he snapped, “what have your people learned from the spaceship Davis stole?” His men had simply reported finding nothing special aboard. Then Guthrie made a personal call, reclaiming her, and the Lunarians acquiesced.

“Very interesting, that.” The generated voice grew entirely human; Sayre could hear the sarcasm. “Yours did pretty well. Oh, it was up to me to learn that Wash Packer had ordered a launcher loaded in, but your experts didn’t delay matters at Port Bowen by more than about forty hours. My boys didn’t accomplish much except observe what the dog did in the night time.”

“What?”

“The dog did nothing in the night time. Never mind. There was no launcher in the ship. They ran some tests and found that one had been fired off within the past few days.”

Chill walked along Sayre’s spine. “This means—”

“Yeah. What we suspected he might try. If I hadn’t been so goddamn busy fast-talking people and covering my ass here in Quito, I’d’ve acted on it sooner. Now we’ve both got to. Davis sent the other me off in space. The destination can hardly have been anywhere but L-5. He’ll have covered the distance by now.”

Sayre swallowed. “I’ve had no word about that. You know I’ve had potential conspirators in the colony detained and all space-related activities watched.”

“Uh-huh. Maybe he’s still in orbit. I’ll go look. Personally, in my torch, as soon as I can plausibly get away. Meanwhile, though, you’d better send reinforcements to L-5 and instigate a ransacking. Pronto. Somebody may have him stashed, waiting for a chance to make him known.”

Hope dazzled. “If we can catch him, quietly—”

The basso grew parched. “That’d be nice. However, it wouldn’t take us out of the woods. Packer and his family
are at large. They know. How many more? We’ll prepare for the worst-case scenario, that alter-Guthrie pops out of his closet before we can touch him; but our plan needs to provide against whatever may happen whether he does or not.”

Sayre nodded. “The Synod is fully informed and ready. We can declare a state of national emergency at any moment we choose, and mobilize the militia reserves within twenty-four hours. The Federation Assembly will scream, but our delegation can keep it tied in knots for several days. After that, we’ll see what can be done about damage control.” He drew breath. “Fireball will be enormously helpful, both during the crisis and afterward.”

“Within limits, as I’ve tried and tried to explain to you. Christ, but humans are inefficient! I sometimes wonder if I really would like to be one again.”

Startled, Sayre blurted, “Would you?”

A whisper: “Yes and yes, always—” Immediately, harshly: “Well, get off your duff and make those arrangements. Then you can be farting at that end instead of out your mouth. I’ve got my own work to do. If I haven’t called you before, check back with me at this time tomorrow, but otherwise don’t pester me about anything less than Fenris breaking his chain. Savvy? Out.” The screen blanked.

For a span Sayre continued staring into it. Rage went acrid up his gullet. He should have put that malvado in a quiviran hell while he was able and had his technicians make him one more docile!

He mastered his feelings. Wishful fantasy. The ape in him, gibbering. Done was done, and the consequences not to be lamented but to be used rationally. He’d had no way of foreseeing that this Guthrie would turn out so vicious. Nor had there been time to keep trying. Besides, the basic personality must be preserved, or Fireball would never accept it as genuine; nor, probably, would it be able to steer Fireball. And it was indeed doing what it was programmed for, as well as could be expected. What hurt, Sayre admitted, was that he’d thought it would be his friend.

He sighed, rose, paced to the viewscreen and looked at
the scene outside. Rain fell gray on Futuro. The buildings seemed hueless, hunched, as if in decay. Many were, he knew, two decades after his government proudly, symbolically created this new capital for the Union. They were all fundamentally alike, too, in spite of every computer-generated architectural variation. It was not a style that inspired a school; nobody else built like this. Ottawa or poor burnt-out Washington had more character, more meaning.

No. Sayre straightened. Avantism made its mistakes, but it would go on. In the end, perhaps after a hiatus, perhaps under a different name and in different hands, it would prevail: because that was the nature of the universe.

A line drifted through his head.
Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt
—What was it, where and when had he heard it? … Yes. Shakespeare. Vera doted on Shakespeare, was forever quoting him, and certainly he’d had a majestic way with words, trivial though the content was. But not to think about Vera. Not to let old pains awaken. The divorce was—nine years?—in the past. Sometimes he dreamed about her, but that was the primitive in him. He had his satisfactions, his hygienic accommodations of the needs of the body. He had his work, his duty, his vision.

The melting away of the flesh. Liberation, transcendence, Transfiguration. Millions or billions of years hence, the cosmic Oneness. How could Guthrie conceivably regret being what he was?

Sayre smiled, recognized malice, and indulged it for a few seconds. Guthrie had no choice, except oblivion.

Fantasy: Imprint memories in a biological body, whether this was cloned or grown according to an original, rational design. Then discard the worn-out one, new life for old. He had gathered that that was among the dreams of those persons a couple of centuries ago who had gotten themselves frozen after clinical death. It hadn’t worked, of course; it ignored the fact that every cell type requires a special freeze-thaw profile.

Nowadays you could go into suspended animation if you were near the end of your span, and wait for science to
devise the means of a glorious technoresurrection. Couldn’t you? True, a suspend didn’t last more than a few decades. After that, the accumulated unrepaired damage from such factors as background radiation was too much. But you might expect biotechnics to advance exponentially while you waited.

Forget it. Nobody would ever make anything ageless that was recognizably human; the genome said otherwise. Evolution had selected for parents who got out of the way of their adult children. Whatever else you might synthesize would be too alien to contain your mind.

Then why not clone yourself, in a series of copies, lifetime after lifetime? Why, that had already been done. It didn’t even require a seed cell. The individual genome map was a part of every up-to-date medical database. That had become standard practice when Guthrie was still alive.

But this did not get you away from carbon chemistry and quantum mechanics. An organic brain
could not
accept a download as a piece of network software could. The process took too long. The brain was too labilely active. It would not recognize those separate bytes creeping in, it would reject them or distort them or go unrecoverably crazy in the torment of them.

So if Guthrie wished to be flesh again, he was trapped.

But why did he think of it thus? Why did he not strive forward to the perfection of robot existence, beyond anything possible to organic molecules? He could fund a research program that would in a few years advance psychonetics by an order of magnitude. He did not, he would not. Instead he obstructed, connived, compromised, fought delaying actions, to keep as many of his workers humans for as long as might be.

Old Guthrie did. New Guthrie had been shown the truth. Give him time to assimilate it.

He had time. The bastard. How good it would be to outlast him, or at least to match the centuries before him.

Not absolutely impossible. Given Avantist victory, surely Enrique Sayre could claim a well-earned reward, his own downloading.

But that would create another Sayre, a machine Sayre. Still
this
flesh must die, and never know what came afterward.

Unless the Ultimate recreated it as a line within a program you might call Paradise—

Sayre stiffened his back, wheeled about, and got busy.

E
ARTH WAXED AS
the sun trudged west. Kyra spied it just above the northeastern horizon when she had scaled the mountain down which she earlier scrambled. Not quite three-quarters full, it hung blue-and-white marbled, a cabochon gem on a raven’s breast, sigil of serenity. But—impatience flamed—it wasn’t that really, it was a clock, it had already swept out four of its days and nights while she lay captive. God, how many more?

And yet, what wonders here were hers!

The thought made her turn about, expectant. Faceplate darkening itself against the glare in that direction, she now saw the heights as a confusion of broken rock, scarred ashen slopes, and shadows. Airless, to her it was not silent; she breathed, her heart beat, and likewise for her space-suit, ventilating, thermostatting, purifying, absorbing, recycling, well-nigh another organism. Barren, to her it was not lifeless; Rinndalir bounded from below, up into her view.

The motion made his cloak swirl, a ripple and sheen of gray. He unfolded the membranes that reached through slits in it, and iridescence quivered from his shoulders, two slender lengths matching his height, dragonfly wings. But it was cat-lithe that he moved toward her, lapis lazuli-hued save for his face that laughed within the cowl. A star sparkled at the tip of the wand he bore.