Harvest of Stars (53 page)

The box formed a sigh. “It hardly matters. In either case, you need their support. Fireball’s deep in the dung pile.”

“’Fraid so. Violation of law on a global scale. We couldn’t break troth—”

“I had to!” screamed the casket.

The robot laid a hand on it, most gently. “I know.”

He stood like that until the eyestalks stopped trembling. Then he stepped back and said, “Nothing will ever be the same again, that’s for certain. And Rinndalir, the Lunarian I’ve had most to do with, he makes no bones about being glad of it. I think he hopes the entire system will tear itself to pieces.”

Bodiless Guthrie had calmed anew. “From his view-point, if I’m not misjudging his culture, he’s right, you know. Also, I’d give moderate odds, from yours.”

“Huh?”

“Listen. This isn’t just the faith nailed into me speaking.

At least, not entirely. Avantism has crumbled, no doubt, but the logic of events is as sound as ever. The Transfiguration Xuan foresaw, it’s going to happen regardless—maybe, now, a bit faster—unless something absolutely radical, some catastrophe, kicks the whole chessboard over.”

“This isn’t quite that sort of upheaval,” the robot argued. “In fact, I expect, I hope everybody will pussyfoot through the next few years. What’s taken place has rocked them back. Me too.”

“Whether you can manage to pussyfoot is another matter. How long, for instance, can Fireball stay halfway human? Gets harder, makes less economic sense, all the time, doesn’t it? And soon, I’ve learned, you should be seeing full artificial intelligence.”

The robot made a chopping gesture. “That’s for then,” he said brusquely. Softer: “I came here today, first watch when I’ve had a couple of free hours, to ask you—myself—what we should do about you.”

The reply was immediate. “Terminate me.”

The robot raised his hands. “No, wait. You’re too dangerous to keep, the way you are, true. But a reprogramming—”

“Don’t insult our intelligence,” snapped the other. “To find how to reprogram, you’d have to make copy after copy of me and tinker them apart in hell, experimenting. Anyhow, I don’t want it. Even if I were changed, I wouldn’t want it.”

“Why?”

“Too much blood.”

“It’s on me too,” the robot whispered. “The exact figures aren’t in yet, but Fireball killed several hundred people, and hurt many more.”

“You’ll have to live with yours,” said the casket. He barked a laugh. “Live!” In quick, flat words: “You’ve got your duty, to those pilots who did the job and to everybody else. I’m not necessary, not obligated. And my actions brought it on.”

“Not your fault.”

“Let me go!” roared Guthrie. “In Juliana’s name, let me go!”

The robot spent hardly a minute in deciding. This was himself, after all. “Okay,” he said low. “In her name. When?”

“Soon as possible.”

“Anything you’d like first?”

Sudden tenderness responded. “Yes. One favor. A look at the last thing we really shared, we two.”

The casket had no need to say more. The robot picked him up and carried him over to a point from which, cradled in the hands, he saw among the stars Alpha Centauri.

“C
OME
,” E
IKO SAID
when Kyra began to voice the trouble that was in her, “before we speak of this, let us go to where peace is.”

Hand in hand they wandered from the apartment and down the passages. Folk who recognized one or both of them called greetings that were warm but not exuberant, and seemed to take for granted that they wouldn’t stop to talk. Others likewise went about their business or even their pleasure more quietly than of old. They hadn’t cheered, either, while Kyra and her fellow pilots led Holden’s men away for ferrying back to North America. Everybody was glad to see them leave, including themselves, but soberly. Returning to L-5 on her own, she found the hush deepened.

And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour
.

The fahrweg brought the pair to Trevorrow Preserve. Still mute, they walked across the meadows. A number of people had sought here, couples and small groups, none alone. For the same reason, Kyra thought. Sky and sun,
clouds and breezes were artificial, the openness an illusion, but they were what there was, and the leaves, blossoms, winged creatures did genuinely live.

Nobody else was at the Tree, though. Maybe its mightiness roused feelings too strong for comfort. Kyra and Eiko climbed to the third stage. Thence a walkway ran along a nearly horizontal bough. At its end was another platform, with bench seats under two of the rails. Branches forking from the sides, growing up from below, drooping down from above, draped curtains of deep-green needles. They stirred and rustled in the wind. Glimpses of mass and height, growth and radiance, flickered through them. Warmth baked a resiny fragrance out of the bark, which was so strangely soft to touch. A thrush flew by.

They sat down, facing. Eiko’s breath, which the ascent had quickened, became easy again. She met Kyra’s gaze and smiled as a mother smiles at a child who is hurt. “Now we can talk,” she said.

Kyra looked from her, into distance. “Gracias, querida,” she replied tonelessly. “I don’t know, however—I’ve been wondering more and more while we came—what good it’ll do. Just tossing the obvious back and forth.”

“That is not for nothing. We should not merely know what is in our hearts, we should share it. And perhaps, barely perhaps, out of that will come a vision. I also have been thinking, you see. This is about Fireball and the future, surely?”

“Of course. You’re right, I’ve got to unload on somebody, and you—” Kyra looked back and spoke fast. “What’s happened lately wasn’t the real crisis. That’s building up like a breaker, and when it crashes over us, I don’t know if we, Fireball, will live through it. Your father, he understands politics better than most. What does he expect?”

“He says the reaction against Fireball, after what it did, will continue gathering force,” Eiko answered levelly. “Guthrie-san has shown what power he can wield, and it is horrifying. Fear breeds hatred. Emotion feeds on itself.”

“But we had to act!” Kyra cried. “We had to! Didn’t we?”

“You were true to yourselves—”

“Gracias,” Kyra mumbled. “I needed to hear that.”

“—as the Taira were,” Eiko finished.

Kyra blinked. “Hm?”

“Or the Sioux or the Confederates of your country’s past. They won their victories. But in the end their enemies broke them.” Eiko sighed. “Yet nothing is immortal. Where now are the Minamoto?”

“We could fight. We could make all Earth bow down to us.” Kyra’s voice dropped. “We won’t, plain to see. Hell, I wouldn’t. I couldn’t kill like that, not for troth or anything. The way Guthrie puts it is, ‘We’d have to become a goddamn government ourselves. What’d be the point?’”

“He will not hesitate to use his economic strength, I imagine. He can negotiate. Compromise. Buy time.”

Kyra nodded, then slumped, elbows on knees, staring at the deck. “Oh, yes. In the long run, what for?”

“I understand.” Eiko sat still a while in the murmurous wind.

Then she leaned over, patted her friend’s shoulder, and said quietly, “I have had some thoughts about that. Doubtless they are impractical, but you might care to hear them.”

Kyra lifted her head. “Say on.”

“The Federation will try to force Fireball and Luna under its control. They will resist. Which prevails, my father does not venture to predict, but he thinks the odds are that it will be the Federation, at least to a high degree. For he believes—he hopes, as I do, and as you seem to confirm for us, that Fireball will deny itself any further use of violence, the ultimate sanction.” Eiko paused. “But even if it nevertheless stays free, and Luna keeps her sovereignty—after all, they both mainly wish to preserve the order of things that has been—that order is doomed. Already, by what it did, Fireball has irretrievably changed everything, including itself. And time hastens onward.”

Kyra nodded again. “Social evolution. Machine evolution. The whole universe mutating out from under us.”

“We have other universes.”

Kyra’s eyes widened. “Huh?”

Eiko laughed a little. “Not literally, I suppose. I mean other worlds.”

“You mean we should emigrate? Eiko, you know better than that.”

“I have followed the technical arguments as best I was able. It is true, not many could go. But they would be those who truly desired.”

“Go? Where, for MacCannon’s sake? Where is any real estate we could use?”

Bare rocks, Kyra thought, barren wastes, crematorium heat, tomb cold, lethal radiation, unbreathable air or none—the beauty and the majesty of God, a wealth of resources which had saved Earth from being stripped and poisoned lifeless, but nowhere a place for the son of man to lay his head or the daughter hers. Oh, you can fashion yet another colony on Mars or on a moon or asteroid, you can build yet another O’Neill, but what shall it profit? You will be no more free than you were. You can move to the Oort cloud, to the realm of the outermost comets, where the sun is merely the brightest of the stars, and it won’t be far enough.

“Alpha Centauri. The planet called Demeter.”

Kyra’s surprise was at Eiko saying such a thing. “Aren’t people done with fantasizing about that?” she fleered. “Hopeless. Habitable, yes, sort of, but the life has hardly started crawling out of the sea and it isn’t compatible with our kind anyway. As for the land, the stoniest desert on Earth is a Paradise garden by comparison.”

“Pioneers could therefore in good conscience make what they wished of it.”

“The trip—You know what the specs would be, the cost. You’re not ignorant. Or have you forgotten? Sending a handful of settlers would bankrupt Fireball itself.”

“Therefore the society they fled, this Burning House, could not follow them.”

“And for what? In a thousand years, smash! The end.”

Before Kyra spun the images she had seen played out on computer screens. Two suns in orbit about one another—but
no, it was more intricate than that. Afar swung Proxima, ember of a red dwarf, often flaring but feebly, a captured wanderer, too dim and remote to matter. A was the big one, shining not unlike Sol but almost half again as bright. B had about a third of that luminosity, and a single planet remaining after its companion snatched Phaethon from it. A had three of its own, Demeter the outermost. And Demeter bore life.

How terribly few were the worlds that did, even as primitive as Demeter’s. Mars had done so once, briefly, before the chill and the drought made a mummy of it. The Centaurian globe did later, as A grew hotter in its aging and glaciers melted to make oceans. There too, how short a span until death reclaimed dominion.

A could firmly hold planets out to perhaps two and a half times the distance of Earth from Sol. The domain of B was less. Elsewhere between the suns was the forbidden zone, where they perturbed every orbit to chaos and nothing existed save asteroids on wild and shifty tracks. Into that region had Phaethon edged—a billion years ago? Thereafter each pass made its path less stable, until at last it came to the point where A seized it from B and it ran around the larger star, retrograde, in ever-changing cometlike ellipses. Those intersected the track of Demeter at equally fickle nodal points, for which reason humans gave the body the same name as an Earth-crossing asteroid. At Alpha Centauri, the name became a great deal more meaningful.

It was impossible to calculate the position of the renegade more than five or ten thousand years ahead, but it was also irrelevant. In a trifle above one millennium, Phaethon would collide with Demeter.

“And the other systems we know of with oxygen-atmosphere planets, they’re too far,” Kyra went on. “Suspends would be permanently dead before any ship we could build to carry them got there. Not that Alpha Cen’s reachable, as a feasible matter, by anything but robots and downloads. But supposing we managed it somehow, what’d be the gain? No, we’re stuck where we are.”

She had thought she had come to terms with the vision of a reality in which life was frail, vanishingly rare, an accident. She found now that she had not.

Eiko broke it for her: “A thousand years can be lived in. They go well beyond any time that the values you cherish are likely to survive here. During them, much could happen.”

“Sure. All kinds of nonsense could get babbled.”

In Eiko’s countenance Kyra saw not hurt but compassion. She curbed herself and said unevenly, “I’m sorry. That was uncalled for. My bitterness speaking. You … you’re serious, aren’t you?”

Eiko smiled anew. “In part. We may freely play with ideas, now when nobody else listens.”

“M-m—bueno, it always was a grand daydream. Given a thousand years, a colony might work something out. But Eiko, it’s such a forlornly long shot.”

“Does that mean it is ridiculous?” the other replied. Her gaze went into the swaying, whispering, light-unrestful green. “Some fantasies came to me while I sat, often and often, high in the Tree. Fancies about evolution. It has no purpose, the biologists tell us, no destiny; it simply happens, as blindly and wonderfully as rainbows. Nevertheless the scum on ancient seas becomes cherry blossoms, tigers, children who see the rainbow and marvel.”

And it becomes killings, cancers, and governments, Kyra thought. But what the hell. Aloud: “I’ve heard assorted rhapsodies about humankind going to the stars, of course. Who hasn’t? Each of them founders on the practical problems.”

“The fish that first ventured ashore had considerable practical problems. Please, dear, let me continue.”

“Sure. Sorry.”

“I have wondered—” Eiko reached to lay hold of a twig that fluttered near her. She held its needles against her cheek and released it to the air. “Why is this, the Tree, here?” she asked. “Life, evolution—the germ plasm that evolution works on does not seek of its own desire to where selection can winnow it—life has brought not just humans but grass and trees and birds into space. Why?

How does this happen? Is it not because we bear needs we must fulfill, as old as our ancestry? I think the life force is not, in its innermost being, progressive. It is profoundly conservative. It does what it must to keep what is.”