Harvest of Stars (57 page)

But then the tugs took hold of her and drew her—slowly, slowly, as great as the mass was—spiraling outward. When they released her near Jupiter, she was the merest sliver against the belts and zones and monster hurricanes of the king planet. Its gravity twisted her from the ecliptic plane and aimed her at rendezvous. Her nethermost stage awoke, matter and antimatter blazed into energy, plasma torrented down a cliff of force-field surges. That river ran almost cold, almost invisible, for hundreds of kilometers before it lost coherence and hard radiation fountained from a wan, dissolving fireball.

At first even this mightiest set of torchcraft ever launched could barely lay any increment to her speed. Second by second, though, hour by hour, day by day, mass waned and acceleration waxed. When she reached her trajectory and went free, she would be flying at half the haste of light; her instruments would register skies gone strange, space shrunken and time quickened. Near journey’s end, she would back down on her goal in a few weeks. The minds aboard would know little of those years. Lest they lose themselves in the emptiness, they would rest safely unconscious.

Unexisting, said a thought among them.

No, it will be no different from the silence of cold sleep that’s to close on my other self. Will it? Not much. It’s we who are different. She can’t lie centuries changeless like me; she can’t be stopped, only slowed, for she’s organic, vulnerable, mortal. She’s alive. I am a network and a program.

I am connected. I can use the ship’s systems. Look, yonder shines the sun, hardly more than a star. How I gloried, riding
Kestrel
through this range! Where’s Alpha Centauri? Why, right there. Instantly I knew. The computer figured it for me, as easily as my arm once told me where my hand was. Amplify. Diamond A, golden B, distant coal
of Proxima. Often I looked through my own eyes and longed. Now, some years hence, I’ll be going. Except that I shall not. I am already on my way, and have neither mouth to laugh for joy nor flesh to feel it.

Belay that! I knew quite well what I was letting myself in for. Or imagined I did. It seemed like a toss-up, a fifty-fifty chance that I could go on in my life, proud that I’d done a service necessary but beyond the call of duty. And of course I won the toss. The I who’s on Earth did. This I is bound to the vows. Somehow, I didn’t understand. Too late now.

No sense in weeping. I can’t, anyway. I shouldn’t miss love, breath, hunger, a bare foot on grass wet with sunrise, should I? That body is no longer what generates me. I’m gone from her needs and appetites, tears and triumphs and tendernesses. Visions that would blind her, adventures that would kill her, await me. I must practice being a machine.

When its work is done, I can terminate me.

—Kyra?

Jefe?

—We’ll be switching off soon, you know. I’ve been linking with the others, one by one, to gab a bit. They’d like to form a general hookup before we say goodnight. “Communion” sounds too fancy for me. Call it a party. Want to join in?

I— No, I think not, gracias.

—You sure? Ought to be helpful. We’re lonesome critters at best, we downloads.

Oh, God, we are!

—Kyra, querida.

?

—You’re having your dark night of the soul, aren’t you?

I’ll manage.

—Wait. Don’t shut me out yet. Please. I don’t mean to intrude on your privacy. You keep an idea of privacy, don’t you? You, an individual, free to give or withhold. But you’ve got no more skin to cover your nakedness. I know, I know. Don’t try to curl up around yourself. That just
guards the hurt. Open as wide as you can, wider than you dare. Be one with the universe.

Are you?

—No. I tried a long time ago and failed. But allow me that I speak from experience. An ideal, something you can measure by and maybe come a tad closer to, makes existence make sense.

In the absence of anything else.

—Yeah, I savvy. Kyra, I won’t feed you a line. I’ve been alive and I’ve been what I am, and alive is better. It must be worse for you. I was old and tired, everything behind me. You were young and full-blooded. You’ve lost the tomorrows that should have been yours. But you do have others. And they won’t be a mere string of jobs to get through, in between shadowy grievings for a past that grows less and less real. You’ll learn how to be what you are and find pleasure in it.

So you promised me.

—I didn’t lie. Wouldn’t, not to you. We’ve been through a fair-sized chunk of hooraw together, haven’t we? With more to come, lots more.

I … I suppose I shouldn’t feel depressed. What have I got to feel with?

—Good gal. You can joke a little. Actually, you’ll find that feelings aren’t all in the glands. You’ll learn, I say.

You did.

—Hey, let’s shack up for a while. We’ve got several hours with no calls on us. Listen to my stories, which may or may not be true, and I’ll hear whatever you care to tell, and we’ll look back but also ahead and maybe at last we’ll sing “MacCannon.” How about it?

I wonder if love, of a sort, may still be possible.

O
N HER LAST
day among the Keiki Moana, Kyra went to sea with them. She anchored the boat near a reef, stripped off her clothes, and dived overboard. For hours they were together. They rollicked in the waves, searched out the miracles that grew and swam about the coral, sought the beach to rest and drink wind and sunlight and the vision of immense many-hued surging, shouted back at the crash and white geysering of the breakers through which they struggled to swim again. As well as she was able, she joined in the hoarse songs and intricate dances.

From this she drew peace, which she made a shield against doubts and dreads. Here were overwhelming beauty and multitudinous life, her kind of life, she kin to every beast and bird and blade of grass; here she belonged. That life had been saved and the planet had begun to be cleansed, before she was born. It might well burgeon into something like its ancient splendor before she died. In the past decade bioreclamation had advanced by ever longer strides and population control—ultimately, population reduction—was taking hold in the last, most backward countries. It was as if the clash with Fireball had shocked humankind into sanity. Did she indeed want to leave, forever?

Yes, she told herself. Through half that time she’d been no deeper into space than L-5. Had influence not gotten her a post at this station, she—would have yielded to Rinndalir, she knew. To help these metamorphs, teach them, study and learn from them, speak to the world for them, had been fascinating, heartwarming, sometimes heartbreaking, always full of a sense that it mattered what she did. But every clear night she gazed up at the stars.

The sun declined. A pleasant weariness pervaded her muscles. “I must go now,” she said. Charlie made a noise of mourning. She stroked the big scarred head and swam
to her boat. The Sea Children followed it, dark streaks and leaps through the light that shimmered over the wave-crests. While she made fast at the dock, they crawled ashore. The ride back had dried her. She dressed and went to bid them goodbye.

“A’o’a, a’o’a,” they croaked, crowding about. Sunshine caressed their flanks. The fish smell of their breath was a clean pungency in her nostrils. The noses that nuzzled her palms were wet and bristly and quivered as if the creatures strove not to weep.

“Farewell, fare you well,” she called.

“[We wonder how we shall without you, dear sister,]” Charlie said.

“You have others who care.”

“[May they bear young who do.]”

Would they? she wondered. Everything was changing so fast. The youths she met were like none she knew when she was their age. If people were losing violence and cruelty, was that because they were losing an uncouth energy that had driven them from the caves to the ends of the Solar System? Could this evolution go on, or might it lash back in some new mania? “I will remember you all my days.”

“[And we will remember you, also after we who are here have died. You will live in our songs. As long as our kind endures, we will dance with your spirit by moonlight in the waters.]”

However long that would be.

Kyra’s glance strayed to the wan half-disc in eastern heaven. A shiver passed through her. She might have been there this moment. Though Fireball’s pilots flew no more, its ships nearly all gone to the roboticizing World Space Authority, the Selenarchs kept their antiquated few craft. Rinndalir had offered her the captaincy of one of his. Her home aground would have been in that mountain castle. … It would bewilder her quite enough to meet him at far Centauri.

“Adiós,” she gulped. “
Aloha nui loa
.” She pushed her way from the throng and fled up the hillside.

Another memory loped beside her. Nero Valencia was
going too. Bueno, admit he was brave and capable, and on Demeter he’d have no cause to murder anybody. Would he?

Her informant emitted the signal that unlocked the gate in the fence. She went through and stopped short. Her car stood alone on the parking lot. A man waited nearby, as black against the sun as his shadow stretched before him. “Oh—”

He gave her a Fireball salute and approached. She recognized Washington Packer’s son Jeff, a good-looking hombre in his twenties. “Saludos,” he greeted shyly. “I hope I don’t intrude, Pilot Davis.”

Her glance flickered around. Zealously though the privacy of the emigrants was guarded, one way or another journalists and multivision flitterlets kept slipping through to plague them. “If you haven’t been followed,” she said.

“I was careful.” Packer obviously felt he should explain in detail. “When I realized I just had to see you, I begged my dad to give me your phone number. Not your address, only your number and scrambler code. He and Mother … they don’t refuse me much these days. I called, got Sr. Lee, asked if I could talk with you alone at your convenience. He suggested, instead, I come out here where you’d be, and he’d arrange for the gate to let me through.” For Kyra’s sake, two portals a kilometer off on either side barred access to the road. They had shot down a couple of telebugs, which put a stop to such intrusions. The public soon grew bored with views of her from high altitude. Packer sighed. “He’s a very simpático man, isn’t he?”

“That’s his business,” Kyra said. “You sure you weren’t noticed?” The pests could be lurking outside.

“I wore my life mask and took a cab.” Packer gestured at his pouch. Most of the emigrants had acquired a bionetic pseudoface to slip on when they badly wanted anonymity.

Kyra laughed. How relieving that felt! “Then I’ve got to give you a ride home.”

“Oh, no, señora. I can call from the gate.”

“Of course I will, you tonto, and we’ll talk on the way. I owe your father a lot.”

Somberness fell over the brown countenance. “He hasn’t been in a position to do much for you lately,” perforce retired.

“I haven’t forgotten. And we’re going to be shipmates, you and I. Planet mates.”

“That’s what I hoped we could talk about.”

“You’re hesitating? I don’t blame you.”

“Never!” he cried. “What’s for me on Earth?” His was the dream that had formed her life, but he was born too late to have had any share in the reality.

Kyra took his hand. “Let’s go,” she said, and led him to the car.

They didn’t speak further until past the gate. She drove on manual, leisurely, twisting among trees and ferns and great gaudy flowers. It gave her a physical occupation. “What’s your trouble, consorte?” she asked. “How can I help?”

She heard the strain. “It’s my folks.”

“They’re trying to stop you? I’m surprised.”

“No, they aren’t. They say they’re proud of me. But—” His voice wavered. “Pilot Davis, you’ve got parents same as me. And a brother, no? I’ve two sisters, who have their own families. We’re close, the bunch of us.”

Kyra waited, knowing what would come next.

“How will you tell your folks adiós? How’ll you keep them from grieving? It’s like death, this. One-way trip. When I revive at the end, my parents will probably be dead and maybe my sisters. They’ll be old, at least, and no bandwidth for more than a few words of message once in a while, four and a third years on the way.”

Kyra nodded. “True.”

“Yes, it hurts me personally, everything I’m leaving behind. I know a girl—But if only I didn’t feel it hurting
them
so! Am I being conscienceless selfish?”

Kyra picked her words one by one. “I’d scarcely call it that. You’re bound for risk and hardship beyond foreseeing, and not simply because it’ll get you a job in space. It’s also because you’ve caught this notion—hardly even an idea, as vague and unprovable as it is—this notion that
that’s the best chance for your children’s children. Which means Wash’s and Mary’s great-grandchildren.”

“They don’t believe it is. They keep quiet about it, but I know they don’t believe. Do yours?”

“Bueno, my father agrees with me, sort of.” She must bare herself to him in his need. “My mother—‘Fly, bird of mine,’ she said, and tried not to cry.”

“Do you know anything I can tell mine,” he pleaded, “anything I can do, that might make it easier on them?”

Kyra gave him a look. “Tell them how much you respect them.”

“Hm?” he mumbled, surprised.

She turned her eyes back to the road. “Losing sons and daughters used to be a common fate. They’d go to war or to lands beyond the mountains or over the seas, and not return. Those who stayed behind might never hear whether they lived or died. We’ve gotten out of the way of that, in this tamed, known, machine-tended world you and I want free of. Bueno, your kin and mine have the old strength. They can accept a life that’s more than entertainment. We should honor them for it.”

“M-m-m.” He sank into thought.

Presently they spoke anew. When she let him off at his apartment in Hilo, he thanked her. She wondered how much good she had done, how much truth she had uttered.

She went on to the home she and Lee had rented these past several years. The location had been necessary for her, inconvenient for him. He could do his thinking, computing, and long-range communicating anywhere, but he must frequently go back to the mainland for days or weeks at a stretch, to gather data and experiences. Nonetheless he had settled in without complaint.