Harvest of Stars (54 page)

Against all common sense, ghosts walked suddenly through Kyra’s bones and out to the ends of her nerves. “We went to space, really, to save life on Earth,” she breathed. “And the groundside measures—the Renewal was an aberration, the job got done in spite of the fanatics. … Pilgrims to America so they could stay what they were. ‘Our rights as Englishmen.’”

“Humans are primitive, unspecialized animals,” Eiko said. “We conserve much that others have lost.”

“But that’s because we did evolve special features,” Kyra argued. “Hind-legs walking, power-grip thumb, big brain.”

“It is the same for our societies,” Eiko responded. “To save what it is, life perforce adapts, evolves; and so it changes what it is. But the course of that evolution was set by the wish to abide.”

“You think that at Alpha Centauri—” Kyra’s words trailed away.

Eiko spread her hands. “Simply a thought. I agree, doubtless a crazy one.”

“If you really believed that, amiga, you’d never have spoken it,” Kyra told her.

The ghosts cried in a language she did not know. Her own was stripped-down plain. “I’ve got access to Guthrie these days. I could put a bee in his bonnet. What harm? And who knows, who knows?” the space pilot asked the wind.

E
ARTH WAS A
crescent, pale to behold against sunlight that drowned most stars and seared the Lunar wastescape with heat. Shadows lay thick around rocks and pockmarks. The viewdome over the office dimmed it all down into a twilight, vague as the remembrance of a dream. Three bodies stood beneath, human, humanoid robot, and purely functional machine.

The last of these held the Guthrie who reigned here. His optics dwelt on the man. “Can we do it, Pierre?” he rumbled. “I mean, if we go for broke?”

Aulard raised his brows. The lines in his forehead became furrows. “I am to tell you sis instant?” he replied.

“No, no, of course you can’t, not without your figures and computer models and tests and scaleups and more tests and the dish ran away with the spoon. But an in-principle answer, off the top of that good head for such things which you’ve still got—in principle, is the idea worth checking out?”

“It ’as been examined often enough.”

“Yeah, and found impossibly expensive, therefore not examined further. But today, forget the economics. Can we, given a blank check on Fireball’s resources, if we insist on doing it, can we?”

Aulard shrugged. “It is not me ’oo went loco w’en I was captive, it seems.” His white head turned to the humanoid. “Per’aps you can make ’im see. Too much ’as ’appened to ’im. You remember more clearly. Tell ’im ’ow senseless sis is.”

The metal form was silent for half a minute. It housed the reserve copy of Guthrie that Sayre had ordered made and stored, lately brought from the vault to the Moon. So far the older Guthrie had not downloaded into the newer. Except for what he had observed, read, accessed for himself, the latter was freshly home from Alpha Centauri.

“Demeter?” he said at length. “I don’t know. I’d be glad to go back if—if that was the way to go. I’m not sure whether it is, but—Yes, tell us, Pierre.”

Aulard’s glance returned to the first. “No, you tell me,” he snapped. “Planting a colony, a live colony, on a planet useless and
condamnée
, you fetch me ’ere in person to make a bad joke?”

“Look,” said that Guthrie, “I told you both, this is just a notion I’m exploring. It may well be lepton. Or maybe if it can be done, it shouldn’t. I called you in, instead of calling you, precisely because this is such a question of … feel.” His style; he had always maintained that images, no matter how high-fidelity, lacked blood, and that he, no matter how much computer power was his to link with, had been a better manager when he lived. “You see, we’ve got to ransack every option, and this one is, if nothing else, the shaggiest.”

“W’at is se crisis?”

“You know damn well. With the Federation. Fireball and Luna versus Earth.” Guthrie paused. “But I guess you don’t appreciate how crucial it is. You’re lately out of Sepo detention, followed by a well-deserved secluded vacation with your family.” A tentacle gestured at the humanoid. “And you, Junior, to you the situation must be abstract yet. Maybe you’ll both pick up some sense of urgency if I show you part of my most recent confidential conversation with Sitabhai Mukerji. We agreed to record for our private reference, including in discussions like this. It was shortly after the Kyra Davis I’ve mentioned had made the suggestion to me that I’m asking you about. I’d been thinking like blazes.”

He plugged into the multi, summoned the playback to his auxiliary mentation program, fast-scanned it there, and activated the section he wanted at realtime speed, the Earth-Luna transmission lag edited out. The cylinder filled with separated images of slender dark woman and brawny man. “Yeah, I’ve taken to generating a face for her,” he explained. “Kind of a friendly token, humanizing me a little bit, I hope. Not that it’d sucker her into
anything, she’s a sharp realist and stands by her duty, but—”

Speech began. “—police barely stopped the demonstration from becoming a riot,” Mukerji said. “Will you accept that as an object lesson? There is no lack of others.”

Ghost-Guthrie’s mouth tightened. “We’re really that unpopular in Himalaya too?” he answered low. “I thought those people especially loathed the Avantists.”

“On religious grounds only. The Union government never threatened them. But you—Fireball—you resurrected
war
.” Mukerji drew breath. “You and your Lunarian accomplices. That alliance is as obvious, now, as the Moon itself. The beautiful and holy Moon, made into a menace hanging over our heads.”

Guthrie formed a sigh. “Well, mass emotions have positive feedback, and so crusades get spawned. If I can’t convince you of our peaceful intentions, Madame President, no point in trying to reason with the general public.”

Mukerji’s tone went oddly gentle. “Oh, you know I acknowledge your honesty, if not the Selenarchs’—your honesty according to your lights. Actually, a good many Earthdwellers do. But it doesn’t count. Your very status as criminals doesn’t count. The basic fact is, your lights, your standards, your whole
raison d’être
are no longer admissible in civilization as it has developed. Such a concentration of powers in so few hands, devoid of every social control, is no more tolerable than a pathogen in the bloodstream. Your action has finally brought the long-standing conflict to a head, unambiguous and inescapable. Perhaps we should thank you for that.”

Guthrie’s image frowned. “Ma’am, let’s not waste time on ground we’ve trampled flat. I asked for this talk because I just may have found a way out. But it’s radical at best, if it can be done at all. Before I describe it, may I ask what the latest notions are for dealing with us? Don’t worry about repeating the obvious. I’m trying, at my distance from you and in my condition, to find out what the current context is that we’ve got to work in.”

“You must have been following the Assembly debates, if
not the speeches and editorials and pronunciamentos everywhere else.”

“Sort of. One common idea is to kick us off Earth and break relations, starve us to death, isn’t it?”

“Gyrocephaly, agreed. But it shows how high feelings have become. As do the proposals to build a space military and bring Fireball and Luna to obedience, you to trial, by force of arms.”

“To take us over, is what that means. Ma’am,” said Guthrie without emphasis, “we won’t let it happen. Try, and we’ll boycott you ourselves and see how long you can keep going. Please explain to them.”

“I do, over and over. No, it won’t come to that. Trade with you will continue, in an increasingly strained fashion, because it must.” Mukerji shifted in her chair until she sat and spoke as if she were in the presence of a living man, looking into his eyes. “But if meanwhile a united Earth—in practice, a consortium under Federation governance—if we marshal all the resources we can spare and create our own space marine, then move out where you are and found our own bases, our own industries—this is under real consideration.”

Guthrie’s image nodded. “I see. No big surprise. And we couldn’t prevent, whether by embargo or attack. I wouldn’t let us. It’d go in the teeth of everything my Juliana wanted us to be about.” He made the noise of clearing his throat. “But have you folks thought what it’d cost you?”

“Much too much,” Mukerji admitted heavily. “Nevertheless, the end will be the destruction of Fireball and the reduction of the Selenarchs. For how can you compete with the organized effort of the whole mother planet?” She raised a palm. “Don’t preach to me about government inefficiency. Imagine your markets closed to you, piece by piece. Consider, as well, that we will not saddle ourselves with an obsolete set of positions for humans that robots can fill better.”

“Yeah. And full-aware artificial intelligence is on the way.”

“So the psychoneticists tell me.” Mukerji smiled,
though not gloatingly. Sadly? “In no event can you long go on as you have done, Mr. Guthrie. Whatever we do or do not on Earth, time hounds you. Fireball has had its day. A glorious day it was. I would be sorry to see it end in ignominy.”

“And I,” he said, “to see it end. Not the business. The idea.”

“Untrammeled liberty? Another magnificent fossil, I fear.”

“Could be. I’m not absolutely convinced.” Guthrie’s image hunched its thick shoulders forward. “No, I never did believe anything can be forever. But it can change, it can evolve. We could force you to destroy us, in that criminally wasteful duplication of what we have. Or we could quietly get out of your way—but on our terms.”

Mukerji stiffened. “What do you mean, sir?”

“Some very, very tentative thoughts, which I’d like to see your reaction to. No promises on either side. Maybe you’ll kill the idea here and now. But for the sake of argument, hear it, please. If Fireball gradually disbands, with most of its assets transferred to Earth—to whatever organization you set up for the purpose—would you people first, in exchange, help us toward our goal? It’s not one that could ever, in any way, damage you. Would that kind of deal be arrangeable?”

“Go on,” Mukerji whispered.

Guthrie in the machine switched the playback off.

“She’ll keep this to herself till we make a concrete proposal,” he said. “That’s what I want from you, Pierre, an opinion as to whether it’s worth the large research effort necessary to find out whether a development effort would succeed. If you guesstimate it is, I’ll inform the lady, and she’ll stall for us as long as she can while we do our investigation.”

“Emigration to Demeter,” scoffed the engineer “Absurd. Se magnitude, you may as sensibly propose shipping se Atlantic Ocean up for Luna to ’ave water not from comets.”

“Wait, I didn’t mean the bunch of us,” Guthrie told him. “Not even a big fraction. Some hundreds, maybe.

Those who really want to go, leaving everything they had and risking everything they have, because they hate the rational new order taking over the Solar System.”

“They hate the fact that, in the long run, Xuan was right,” murmured his other self.

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “Maybe the machines own the future, maybe they don’t. I just don’t like turning it over to them for free. As for our consortes who stay behind, Pierre, they’ll be okay. The transition can’t happen overnight. They’ll be needed till they’re ready to retire on nice pensions. Attrition will reduce the human presence in space fast enough to suit anybody on Earth, I should think. Except for those who’ve elected to go start again from scratch at Alpha Centauri.”

“Whatever they make there,” his other self predicted, “it won’t be like anything that was before. It can’t.”

“Certainly not. It might well flop completely, everybody die off as miserably as the Greenland Norse, long before Phaethon puts paid to Demeter’s account. We can but try. Or can we, Pierre? Think of it as a problem in design, if nothing else.”

If the man had not quite kindled, he had begun to smolder as he listened. “
Bien
, say a sousand persons plus supplies and equipment.” He spoke slowly, almost under his breath. “Sey cannot stay in suspended animation longer san, eh, forty or fifty years. After sat, too much irreversible damage from background radiation and quantum chemistry. Serefore, about one-tenss
c
mean velocity.” His gaze went outward, among the unseen stars. “It can be done, yes, sough per’aps two or sree vessels rasser san one large—” He shook his head. “But no. Deceleration squares se mass ratio, remember. I doubt we ’ave antimatter to power so much. We may need ten or twenty years to make enough, after we build added capacity. Meanw’ile se ’ole social-political equation transforms ’erself.”

“Do we have to have reaction braking at the far end?” asked Guthrie in the humanoid.

Aulard looked at him. “W’y, no. Not if— Yes, I recall discussions long ago—” He tugged his chin. “M-m, we send a’ead very soon se little von Neumann machines to
multiply semselves and sen build an industrial plant sat can make a sun-powered laser adequate to slow se ships w’en sey arrive …

“Now you’re talking!” exclaimed the senior Guthrie. “All we need do is boost our ark or arks to one-tenth light speed or thereabouts, and put ’em on trajectory. Is this workable?”

“I must compute before I can be sure,
naturellement,”
Aulard replied, “but I suspect it will still come close to exhausting your energy supply.”

“That won’t matter.”

“No,” said Guthrie in the humanoid, “it’ll antimatter.”

Unreasonable laughter met the childish pun, followed by a sudden excited seriousness.

A P
EACE
A
UTHORITY
squad had gone by, afoot, as Kyra neared the Blue Theta. She realized that sight was not uncommon in the North American megalopolises, and Erie-Ontario seemed peaceful enough. Nonetheless it struck at her. She remarked on it to Robert Lee.

“What did you expect?” he replied. His voice was flat. When she hugged him in greeting, his response had been brief and she felt him tremble. He sat slumped in the recliner opposite her chair. “The Liberation Army is organized and disciplined, but it’s tiny. The Chaotics were only united in their hatred of the Avantists. Now they’re falling apart into their separate factions—and paying off scores—and quite a few ordinary citizens did have a stake in the old order of things, you know, and are unhappy and revengeful themselves—and the economy’s a wreck—” He shrugged.