Harvest of Stars (45 page)

“Bueno?” Sayre cried. “What’s the result?” His eyes stared from dark rims blotched on sallowness. He looked hollowed out.

“It was them, all right,” Guthrie told him. “They fired the word to Luna before I could stop them. They’ll arrive in person pretty soon.”

Silence quivered while photons sped to and fro.

Sayre slumped in his chair. “Then the game is up?” He stiffened. “No. We’ll carry on. Come back. Not to Quito, I suppose that’s impossible for you now, but to us. We’ll give you asylum.”

“No, thanks,” Guthrie replied. “To sit useless forever? Listen. We might still manage more than just damage control. You remember my speculating about the Lunarians, when we first learned they’d shown up at L-5? Plain to see, their intent was to winkle my twin out of there, and they succeeded.
But
they didn’t immediately proclaim what they’d done and why. In fact, they kept mum till I forced them. Doesn’t that suggest they’ve got some intention of their own? What it might be, I don’t know. It could be much worse for you than anything my twin wants. On the other hand, I recall an old saying about fishing in troubled waters. That’s what I aim to try.”

Transmission.

The human peered as if he saw a face in the screen before him. Perhaps he wished he did. “What have you in mind?”

“For the time being, go to L-5, take on reaction mass and antimatter, and prowl space. I’ll leave my crew off there, and I want you—your Synod—to appoint Felix Holden commander of our forces in it. That’ll mean he can get my needs taken care of at once, and he’ll be a tough, smart, reliable man on the spot.”

Transmission.

“I don’t know,” Sayre mumbled. “Some of the cusps in his psychoprofile—Oh, he is loyal.”

“Guys like that may be in short supply once the news breaks,” Guthrie warned. “Let me do as I see fit in space. You’ll have your hands full at home, and then some. Between us, we may yet stay on top of things. We may even end up ahead of the game.”

His electronic senses, probing forward, found the great cylinder, a-wheel against stars.

T
HE ROOM TO
which they brought old Guthrie after his speech was not large; but light and shadow, shifting dim in ceiling, walls, floor, gave a sense of unboundedness unstable as a dream. They left him there on a table with much courtesy: he would appreciate how time ran clamant at their heels, he would be alone no longer than the urgencies upon them compelled, if meanwhile he desired entertainment he need but command the multiceiver.

It opened no communication line to the outside cosmos. He left it dark and waited in his case among his thoughts.

At last there came to him the lady Niolente. Her gown glimmered silver through the many-hued dusk into which her hair melted. Its skirt rustled to her stride, which otherwise did not trouble the silence. She drew up to the table and gazed into the lenses he raised toward her. “Hail, my lord,” she greeted. “In what may I serve you?”

“You know damn well what,” he said. “Where’s Rinndalir?”

She spread her fingers fanwise; an Earthling would perhaps have shrugged. “Much is afoot. At this hour, the task of leadership is his. I, being free for a brief while, have sought to you.”

“Yeah, sure, we’ve got to stay on top of things. Then why the hell are you keeping me here? I don’t even know where on the bloody Moon you’ve taken me to.”

“Rinndalir promised you an accounting in due course. I am come to render that.”

Guthrie muttered something elaborately blasphemous before he said, “Account payable to him and you, eh? Okay, tell me what you want of me, we’ll dicker, and then for Christ’s sake let me go. I’ve got Fireball to take charge of. Can’t that penetrate your Tom o’ Bedlam heads? It must be a snake’s nest by now.”

“Nay, my lord,” she told him calmly. “Thus far, a fragile order endures.”

“Well, of course the consortes have common sense, and they’re used to thinking for themselves, but just the same, this news—”

“Only rumors have flown, by-blow of that call to Luna you were forced to make from space.”

“You mean Rinndalir was forced to allow. I wanted—Wait a flinkin’ minute!” Guthrie roared. “You mean your stooges squelched that word as much as they could manage to, and you haven’t aired my statement I made from here?”

“That would have been impolitic to do at the time, as my lord can belike see upon reflection.” Niolente smiled. “The recording of it has now gone forth. Let me show you how it went.”

Guthrie’s eyestalks lay back like the ears of a cat or lips that curl away from teeth. “Yes. Do.”

She sang a command. The multiceiver on the floor lighted. A machine voice declared, from a background of EMERGENCY symbols, that the major matter announced some hours ago would appear, pre-empting all regular transmissions on and from Luna. Rinndalir’s image succeeded it. He identified himself and declared that what came next, the Selenarchy viewed with the utmost gravity. He did not say this in the heavy manner of an Earthside politician, but in an almost casual tone and with the hint of a smile. That was Lunarian fashion.

“So far, so good, and so what?” Guthrie snapped.

His own image sprang into being, the electronically created likeness of a burly man in middle life, clothes informal and somehow looking rumpled, eyes pale blue and aimed straight at the audience, voice deep and a little hoarse. “To Fireball Enterprises and everybody else, this is Anson Guthrie.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said the program in the case. “What else is new?” Niolente waited, on her feet in an easy posture, a statue that breathed.

Guthrie in the cylinder described laconically what had happened to Guthrie in the box. He did not go into detail, nor name any of his allies except Rinndalir, because, he
explained, the rest of them were still in danger. As for the encounter in space with his other self, he said merely that a ship had intercepted the
Inia—

“Hey, hold on, there!” bawled from the table. Niolente laid a hand on the case. Guthrie did not feel the gesture, as limited as he was when unconnected, but saw it and strangled his oaths.

—fortunately, evasive action foiled the attack. In light of this outrage, the latest of countless that the Avantists had committed over the years against Fireball and freedom and common decency—

“Consejeros and consortes, haven’t we taken enough? Never mind revenge, or simple justice against the persons who commissioned and carried out these violations. We can bring suit before the World Federation and maybe get a judgment for the Peace Authority to enforce, but to what purpose? The Avantist government of the North American Union will continue. It will breed more such persons, who’ll use its machinery to carry out more such antics, while it squats on the North American people and their liberties.
It
is the menace to world peace, world survival, of the same breed as those that went before it, Holy League, Renewal, Communism, fascism, nationalism, every kind of absolutism, back as far as history goes. Here’s our cause to be done with Avantism.”

The face formed a bleak smile. “Not being a politician, I can’t proclaim a grand crusade for thousands of people to get killed in while I sit safe at home and enjoy my perks. However, in the course of my misadventures on Earth, I learned more than I knew before about a resistance movement in North America. The Avantists call those folk Chaotics, but that’s a swear word, propaganda. What they are is men and women who want to be free again; and they’re well organized and responsible, too. Avantism is rotted and crumbling. The revolutionaries want to clear it away, quickly and cleanly, before it can do more harm.

“I can’t tell them how they should go about this. But if they choose to rise against the Avantists, now while the grievances of Fireball are fresh—I’ll call on Fireball to
give them every help in its power. Repeat, this is not a question of getting even. It is that I’ve always loved freedom, and so has our Fireball.”

When after a while (a short while, because he had never been one for oratory) the cylinder blanked, Guthrie rested quiet half a minute before he said, “That was cleverly done. How much did you have prepared before-hand?”

“Rather little, for we could not foresee whether we would have occasion for it nor what form the occasion might take,” Niolente admitted.

“Computer editing and revising, with reference to analyses of every recording of every talk I ever made, and my biography, and the derived psychoprofile—Pretty slick job. The machines will soon be better at being us than we are ourselves, no?”

She moved to stand in front of him. “The changes are minor,” she said, a trace of amusement in her tone.

“Yeah, small, like changing ‘help’ to ‘hell.’”

“You would in truth like to bring down the Avantists.”

He had no head to shake, but his voice did. “No. Not that way, anyhow. Inciting a rebellion—Haven’t you stopped to think what the risks are? You hope to touch off something that’ll be uncontrollable, the consequences unforeseeable.
Why?”

“Precisely for that reason.”

“Wreckage for its own sake? You can’t be that Q-jumpy. Can you?”

“In a sense, conceivably, yes. A quantum leap out of a black hole.”

“Ah, screw the fancy excuses. What do you plan to do next?”

“Abide, and observe what comes to pass.”

“Which’ll be interesting, if nothing else. You’ve poked a stick into the anthill. … But without me to direct it, Fireball won’t long keep up any effort. They’ll start wondering why I haven’t shown, physically. You can’t maintain your fake. If you tried to simulate me sending orders from here, it’d soon turn preposterous.”

“True.” Niolente smiled. “Dread not, my lord. We shall presently release you, with due precautions. The instant of
time for that must await the course of events and our judgment thereof; but it lies in the near future.”

“After all Satan’s dogs are off the leash. Listen—there was nothing about it in your doctored ’cast—my people don’t know my other self is loose in a torchcraft. Do you understand what a danger that is? I do.”

“Thus,” she said blithely, “when you go at large, you may have no option but to lead Fireball in war.”

“And afterward?”

“Afterward, yes, you could turn on us, but we believe you will find it unwise.”

Guthrie lay still for a span. The vague colors and uncertain darknesses flickered slowly around him. Niolente stood amidst them like a candle not yet lighted.

“I’ve a ghastly feeling you’re right,” he said. “But that’s supposing we’ll have that kind of a tomorrow. We could lose, you know. Or everybody could lose, everything crash down in flinders.”

“Would that be worse than what now binds us?” she answered.

T
HE SEPO IN
L-5
could control transmissions from it but scarcely what came to it. At least, that seemed a needless provocation. Kyra Davis heard Guthrie’s broadcast from Luna with the family who were giving her refuge.

“Then we’ll fight!” she cried, a fist aloft where she had leaped erect as she listened. Rage: “And I—do I have to huddle here waiting?”

Wang Zu frowned. “This is strange,” he said heavily. “I would never have expected the jefe to call for war. More than once I have heard him declare he has seen enough violence to supply him until the last star burns out.”

“He did not truly call for it, did he?” ventured his wife. “He only promised help if a revolution does begin.”

Wang shook his head. “Why should he do that unless it is what he hopes for? What he even seeks to detonate.”

Kyra glared at them. “Don’t you
want
those matones off your backs?” She gulped. “I’m sorry. Por favor, excuse me. After all your kindness—”

Lin Mei-ling patted her hand. “We know. This is very difficult for you,” she said with a smile. “Perhaps we are too timid. But it would take so little to destroy this nation.”

Kyra stooped down to hug her. “And y-you have children,” she stammered.

“Let us believe the jefe knows what he is about,” Wang said. Doubt lingered in his tone. “Those Selenarchs may have told him or promised him something. None of us can do anything yet but wait.”

“And carry on with our work,” said his wife.

Yes, Kyra thought, they had their work. She had her schooling in patience to abide while events spun themselves out, her relaxation techniques, her mantras and memories. They would be harder to use in this modestly furnished home than ever in space.

Being alone most of the time made it easier. The Wang boy and girl were at astro camp for a week, drilling in the skills required for emergencies and everyday life. It was one reason why Eiko had placed Kyra here.

Thirty hours passed.

The news erupted from Earth: Sepo headquarters in San Francisco Bay Integrate destroyed by an explosion. The picture was of wreckage still smoking, while rescue vehicles and machines scurried like ants and in the foreground a spokesman related grimly that the dead and hurt were many and that he felt certain the murderers were terrorists. Had not the North American government warned, striven, pleaded for cooperation? As for those fantastic allegations from Luna, the enemies of civilization could perpetrate a hoax as readily as could the Avantists whom they accused, and it was much more plausible that they would.

Three hours later: The same atrocity in Denver. Meanwhile, police had established that the instrument of the first had been a small, stripped-down sports flyer on
autopilot, loaded with gigantite, power-diving straight down from the high stratosphere. Probably the second strike had used the same technique. There would be no third. National forces were on full alert and the President was about to declare martial law.

“How much difference will that make?” Kyra jeered.

“Flash!
The Paris office of Global News Associates has received a communication from persons who claim to be the leaders of a revolutionary underground in North America. On condition that their whereabouts not be traced, Global was given a statement—”

A lean man in a plain gray tunic which had on its breast a stylized comet, speaking more softly than one would have expected: “—Jack Bannon, on behalf of the Liberation Army. They call us Chaotics, and we admit with regret that some crazies and criminals may take this opportunity to run wild, but they are not of us. We are the organized core of resistance to the Avantist tyranny. Our single purpose is to overthrow it and restore constitutional government, freedom under a law that is humane, to our country. We have bided our time in secret less because we lack strength than because fighting could too easily get out of hand. Weapons available to both sides—explosives, pyrotics, toxins, radioactives, biologicals, electronic and computer sabotage of vital services—those weapons can take too many innocent lives.”