Harvest of Stars (72 page)

Guthrie sat down opposite; he ought not to loom over them. “Yes, do relax, lad,” he urged. “Enjoy. Your folks
tell us you’ve been wondering about some things, and think we could help. Not that you can’t learn it from them or at school or on your own, but—well, you’re pretty special to us, and we’d like you to know we aren’t just odd kinfolk of yours, we’re your friends.”

“Don’t go getting the kid above himself,” Anson laughed.

“Ha!” snorted Guthrie. “Just you wait till you’re a granddad.”

“I’ll dote every bit as hard as he, I’m sure,” said Demeter Daughter.

The banter encouraged Noboru. “When will that be?” he piped, and gulped from his drink. “On this planet?”

“We don’t know, dear,” replied his mother. “You and your wife will decide that, if you aren’t on one of the other planets when you meet her.”

Noboru gave her a look. He half understood that she and his father had had a destiny; what was hard to grasp was that nobody else did. Of course, she was unique in her beauty—tall, slim, golden-skinned, black locks falling past high cheekbones, finely molded features, forthright hazel eyes—as his father was unique in his ruggedness and boisterous mirths. But that was because they were
his
parents.

“You see,” Guthrie reminded him, “we’ll soon be ready to move the first lots of people to Isis and Amaterasu,” the chosen globes at 82 Eridani and Beta Hydri. “By the time you’re grown up, quite a few will be leaving every year.”

Noboru frowned, concentrating. “People people?”

“Yes, those few who want it that way,” said Demeter Daughter.

“Those who want to help the machines and machine-bodied downloads change yonder worlds into this kind,” Anson added.

“And to be on them, human, from the first,” Demeter Daughter laid to that.

“Most will have to go as downloads,” Anson said. “We’ll never have the cargo space to carry many as suspends, nor be able to provide for them at the end of the
trip before the planets are really flourishing. They’ll have to wait, switched off. I don’t expect they’ll mind. They’ll miss out on the challenges and excitement of early pioneering, but they’ll miss out on the hardships and dangers as well. In a couple of hundred years, maybe less, the environment and the Life Mother should be ready for them. Then she will activate them and make them into humans.”

“Like you,” Noboru said.

“Yes, dear.” Demeter Daughter stroked his dark locks.

The boy winced, braced himself, and blurted, “What about their old bodies?”

“Confused about that?” Guthrie asked. He glanced at the couple. “You haven’t explained to him yet?”

“No,” Anson confessed awkwardly. “The, uh, the occasion never seemed right.”

“It is a solemn thing, and could be frightening,” Demeter Daughter said. “It’s best that you two tell him.”

Demeter Mother spoke through the multi. The scene became that of a woodland lake under stars. Their light trembled on the water, as if to the nightingale song that ran liquid beneath her words. “When a mind downloads, Noboru, before leaving for the stars, it can be—it almost always will be—with the body asleep; and the body will never wake from that sleep, but pass peacefully into quietness.”

“Then he’s dead!” the child cried.

“No, he is freed from age and pain. His true self will be in the download, and live again in a new body.”

Noboru bit his lip. “And they’ll, they’ll wipe the download?”

“If that’s what it wants,” Guthrie said, “which I reckon it usually will.”

“Do not be afraid of death or of life, darling,” said Demeter Mother. “They are one. See.” The multi showed a dandelion in golden bloom. Time speeded. The flower became a stalk and a puffball, it strewed its seed on the wind and died, leaves fell, snow drifted, spring came again and the land stood in flower.

“He’s kind of young to hear how all those agonizing philosophical-theological conundrums amount to ‘Ask a silly question, you get a silly answer,’” Guthrie muttered. “But maybe we can shove some notion of identity across.” Aloud, to the boy: “Think. A message, a picture, a pattern, they aren’t the same as whatever happens to carry them. Remember that song I sang you about Pilot MacCannon? It was in my voice, but it’s been in a lot of other voices too and will be in more, and it’s been in books and databases and Lord knows what else. They pass away—a book might catch fire, for instance—but it goes on. You’re like a song.”

Anson laid a hand on his son’s shoulder. “You won’t ever have to end,” he avowed. “You can have life after life, on world after world.”

“Until you have had enough,” Guthrie said low.

Noboru cast an astonished gaze on the helmet head. “When w-will that be?” he stammered.

“You will know,” Demeter Mother told him.

He swung toward his own mother. “Do you have to become like, like her?”

“Yes,” said the voice from the kingdoms outside. “On each new planet they will need a new Demeter.”

Anson strengthened his hold. “Not to worry,” he said. “We’ll live our lives as they are, we two here, overseeing the migration.” He smiled. “Somebody’s got to, and we were elected before we woke up, seems. But a download of your mother will go to Isis and another to Amaterasu and a third to Kwan-Yin,” the globe in Puppis, too distant for organic beings to reach, which Guthrie had nonetheless decided would be a home for them. “There they’ll become the Life Mothers.”

“Don’t say that I have to or that I must,” exclaimed Demeter Daughter. “I want to. It’s a—it’s too great, too wonderful for me to understand as I am, but I have my half-memories of it, like dreams I once dreamed.”

“Bringing life to the universe,” said Demeter Mother.

“And you know, lad,” Guthrie put in, his tone calmingly prosaic, “once folks have taken root yonder,
once they’ve built an industry in places that will last, why, they won’t have to destroy any other life they may find, ever again. They won’t need to start with oxygen in the air. They’ll have the power, and the time, to begin from scratch, and make naked rocks blossom.”

Childhood is too often haunted by dreads that the child dares not speak of. Noboru’s were being lured forth to their exorcism. “Will the—so-pho-tects on Earth let us?”

“Hey, are they a boogeyman for you? Don’t give them a hoot. All they’ll ever do is admire their own intelligence.”

“Don’t say that,” Demeter Mother reproved. “We should not scorn them, nor forever shun them. There is more than one Dao, more than one path toward truth. They have their ways to give the universe a meaning, as we have ours. I think in the end humans will seek back to them, as equals, brothers and sisters in the same quest.”

Noboru’s eyes widened. “You’re awfully wise,” he breathed.

Her laugh rippled. “Barely wise enough to guess how little wisdom is mine, dear.”

“But—Mother said—you’re much more’n she is.”

Now a sigh went, like a breeze through leaves. “In some ways. In others, oh, far, far less.” Pause. In the multi a salmon breasted a waterfall, upstream bound to spawn and die. “I am content, but I can never he fulfilled. No living creature ever can be; and that is the real miracle of life.”

“Yes,” Demeter Daughter said, “I’m glad for what I shall be, but I’m also glad for what I am, and don’t want that to end either.”

Anson took the boy’s chin, turned the small face toward his, and spoke gravely. “When we’re old, your mother and I, we’ll download, she for the fourth time, I for the first. And I expect we’ll make the long, long voyage to Kwan-Yin. By then the machines and earlier downloads should have it ready for us and a Life Mother be waiting. We and those who go with us will live again as humans.” His wife smiled at him above the tousled head. He winked back. “You can come along, son, if you wish. Next door on Bion
we’ll find lifetimes of whooping adventures and fantastic discoveries.”

“And afterward, all the stars?” Noboru asked.

Guthrie chuckled. “A chip off the old block, you. Yes, all the stars.”

Noboru looked again at him. The thin voice sharpened. “What about you?”

“Me? Oh, I’ll stay put. Gotten stodgy, I have.”

The boy stiffened. “No!” he screamed. “This planet’s goin’ to die!”

“Not for many years yet,” Demeter Mother said like a caress, while Demeter Daughter hugged him. “Never fear what shall be. Rejoice in what is.”

“She
can’t leave,” Guthrie said, “and I’m not about to leave her alone … then.” He leaned forward, caught the boy’s hand, and held it. “Listen, Noboru. We are not sad. We are not afraid. We’ve had a long span of being, and it was full of love and work worth doing and everything else good, but when the time comes for us to rest, that will be good too.”

“What a load for one little soul,” Demeter Mother murmured. “Why don’t we stop? Whenever you want us, child, wherever you are, we will be there for you, we who love you. But meanwhile, let’s simply be happy together.”

They showed him the marvels that dwelt here, allowed him to play with what he could handle, told him how much more lay beyond the sky but also in every commonplace day ahead of him, miraculous because he would not know what it was until he found it. When they brought him outside, a flock of cranes was passing overhead, southbound for the winter. Demeter Mother called them down. Their wings made a snowstorm around him. He shouted for joy.

In this country at this season, the double sunset came early. Night had fallen when the family started toward their flyer to go home. The wind had ceased but the cold had deepened. The land reached obscure close by, unseen farther on, as if there were no more horizons. In the darkness above shone red Proxima, amber Sol, a purity of radiance that was Phaethon. Encompassing them were
stars in their thousands and the countlessness of the galaxy.

Guthrie stood waving farewell. Words drifted back and forth, “Goodnight. … Tomorrow. …” When the air was again silent he turned about and went to the halidom under the trees, where he would enter into communion with his beloved.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Harvest of Stars series

Lilisaire, Wardress of Mare Orientale and the Cordillera, at Zamok Vysoki, summons the captain Ian Kenmuir, wheresoever he
be. Come, I have need of you
.

From Luna her message rode carrier beams through relays circling millions of kilometers apart, until it reached the communications
center on Ceres. Then the hunt began.

Out here in the deeps, vessels seldom kept unbroken contact with any traffic control station. The computer on the big asteroid
knew only that Kenmuir’s ship had been active among the moons of Jupiter these past seventeen months. It flashed a question
to its twin on Himalia, tenth from the planet. Shunted through another relay, the answer spent almost an hour in passage.
The ship had left the Jovian realm eleven daycycles earlier, inbound for a certain minor body.

Given the flight plan Kenmuir had registered, calculating the direction of a laser beam that would intercept him was the work
of a microsecond or less. It required no awareness, merely power over numbers. Within that vast net which was the cybercosm,
robotic functions like this were more automatic than were the human brainstem’s regulation of breath and heartbeat. The minds
of the machines were elsewhere.

Yet the cybercosm was always One.

The ship received. “A message for the captain,” she said.

Kenmuir and Valanndray were playing double chaos. Fractals swirled through the viewtank before them, in every color and in
shapes beyond counting. Guided more by intuition than reason, fingers stroked keyboards. Forms changed, flowed, swept toward
a chosen attractor, tumbled away as the opponent threw in a new function. Caught in their game, the players breathed quickly
and shallowly of air that they had ordered to be cool, with a tang of pine. They ignored the cabin-wide audiovisual recording
at their backs, a view from the Andes, rock and sky and snowdrift on a shrill wind.

The ship spoke.

“Halt play!” snapped Kenmuir. The contest for a stable configuration froze in place.

He spent a moment beneath Valanndray’s gaze before he decided, “I’ll take it at the console. No offense meant. It may be a
private matter.” Belatedly he realized that the apology would have gone better had he expressed it in Lunarian.

He felt relieved when his passenger replied, in Anglo at that, “Understood. Secrecy is precious by scarcity, nay?” If the
tone was a bit sardonic, no harm. The two men had been getting along reasonably well, but tension was bound to rise on a long
mission, and more than once they had skirted a fight. After all, they were not of the same species.

Or maybe that saved them, Kenmuir thought flittingly, as he had often thought before. A pair of Terran males like him, weeks
or months on end with no other company, would either have to become soul-brothers or else risk flying at one another’s throats.
A pair of Lunarians like Valanndray—well, alterations made in ancient genes had not brought forth any race of saints. But
neither of this team found his companion growing maddeningly predictable.

Kenmuir doubted that their occasional encounters with sophotects had soothed them. An inorganic intelligence—a machine with
consciousness, if you
wanted to think of it in those terms—was too alien to them both.