Harvest of Stars (74 page)

From a cabinet he took a bottle and poured a short brandy. He wasn’t given to solitary drinking, or indulgence in glee or
brainstir or other intoxicants. He severely rationed both his time in the quivira and the adventures he dreamed there. He
had learned the hard way that he must. Now, though, he wanted to uncoil.

He took his chair, leaned back, put feet on desk. The position was more relaxing under full Earth
weight. Yes, bound for Luna, he would most certainly go at that acceleration or better. Lilisaire’s words implied he was free
to squander the energy. So he wouldn’t need the centrifuge to maintain muscle tone. Of course, he would keep up his martial
arts and related exercises. As for the rest of his hours, he could read, play some favorite classic shows, and—and, right
now, call up Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto. His tastes ran to the antique.

As the notes marched forth, as the liquor smoldered across tongue and into bloodstream, his eyes sought the portrait of Dagny
Beynac and lingered. Always her figure had stood heroic before him. He wasn’t sure why. Oh, he knew what she did, he had read
three biographies and found remembrances everywhere on Luna; but others had also been great. Was it her association with Anson
Guthrie? Or was it, in part, that she resembled his mother a little?

For the thousandth time, he considered her. The picture had been taken when she was in early middle age. She stood tall for
an Earthborn woman, 180 centimeters, against the background of a conservatory where flowers grew extravagant under Lunar gravity.
A sari and shawl clothed a form robust, erect, deepbosomed. He knew from recordings that her gait was free-striding. Her features
were a bit too strong for conventional beauty, broad across the high cheekbones, with slightly curved nose, full mouth, and
rounded chin. Eyes wide-set and sea-blue looked straight from beneath hair that was thick and red, with overtones of bronze
and gold, in bangs across the forehead and waves down to the jawline. After half a lifespan of sun and weather and radiation,
her skin remained fair. He had heard her voice. It was low, with a trace of burr—”whisky tenor,” she called it.

If her spirit, like Guthrie’s, had stayed in the world until this day, what might the two of them not have wrought? But no,
she ordered oblivion for herself. And she knew best. Surely, in her wisdom, she did.

Hard to believe that once she too was young,
confused, helpless. Kenmuir found his imagination slipping pastward, as if he could see her then. It was a refuge from the
present and the future. In the teeth of all fact and logic, he felt himself headed for worse trouble than anybody awaited.

It was always something of an event, reported in the local news media, when Anson and Juliana Guthrie visited Aberdeen, Washington.
Self-made billionaires weren’t an everyday sight, especially in a small seaport, twice especially after the lumbering that
had been the mainstay of adjacent Hoqu am dwindled away. Not that this pair made a production of their status. On the contrary,
they took ordinary accommodations and throughout a stay—usually brief, for their business would recall them—they avoided public
appearances as much as possible. Dignitaries and celebrities who tried for their company got more or less politely brushed
off. Instead, the Guthries were together with the Stambaughs and, later, the Ebbesens. This too caused wonderment. What could
they have in common with people who worked hard to earn a humble living?

“We hit it off, we enjoy each other, that’s all,” Guthrie once told a reporter. “My wife and I aren’t silver-spoon types either,
you know. Our backgrounds aren’t so different from these folks’. We’ve known ’em for years now, and old friends are best,
like old shoes, eh?” Those friends said much the same to anyone who asked. The community learned to accept the situation.
As the political climate changed, envy of them diminished.

The relationship came to seem truly remarkable when the Guthries bet all they had on the Bowen laser launcher and founded
Fireball Enterprises. Their failure
would have been almost as spectacular as their success was, if less meaningful. But after seven years their company dominated
space activity near Earth and was readying ships to go harvest the wealth of the Solar System. Nevertheless they returned
to Aberdeen every once in a while and were guests in the same small houses.

At last they even invited young Dagny Ebbesen to come along with them up the coast for a little vacation. Centuries later,
Ian Kenmuir could conjecture more shrewdly than her neighbors ever did what the real reason was and what actually went on.

In the beginning the girl drew strength and comfort more from the woman. Toward the end, though, Juliana drew her husband
aside and murmured, “She needs to talk privately with you. Take her for a walk. A long one.”

“Huh?” Anson raised his shaggy brows. “What makes you think so?”

“I don’t think it, I feel it,” Juliana replied. “She’s fond of me; she worships you.”

He harked back to their own daughter—she was in Quito, happily married, but he remembered certain desperate confidences—and
after a moment nodded. “Okay. I dunno as how I rate that, but okay.”

When he rumbled to Dagny, “Hey, you’re looking as peaked as Mount Rainier. Let’s get some salt air in you and some klicks
behind you,” she came aglow.

The resort was antiquated, shingle-walled cottages among trees. Across the crumbling road that ran past it, evergreen forest
gloomed beneath a silver-gray sky and soughed in the wind. A staircase led down a bluff to a beach that right and left outreached
vision. Below the heights and above the clear sand, driftwood lay tumbled, huge bleached logs, lesser fragments of trees and
flotsam. Surf brawled white. Beyond it the waves surged in hues of iron. Where they hit a reef, they fountained. A few gulls
rode the wind, which skirled bleak, bearing odors of sea and bite of spindrift. At
this fall of the year and in these hard times, Guthrie’s party had the place to themselves.

He and the girl turned north. For a while they trudged in silence. They made an odd pair, not only because of age. He was
big and burly, his blunt visage furrowed beneath thinning reddish hair. Her own hair, uncovered, tossed in elflocks as the
single brightness to see. Thus far she still walked slim and light-foot, her condition betrayed by no more than a fullness
gathering in the breasts. Whenever she crossed a sprawl of kelp she popped a bladder or two under her heel. When she spied
an intact sand dollar, she picked it up with a coo of pleasure. She was, after all, just sixteen.

“Here.” She thrust it into Guthrie’s hand. “For you, Uncans.”

He accepted while asking, “Don’t you want it yourself, a souvenir?”

She flushed. Her glance dropped. He barely heard: “Please. You and … and Auntie—something to ’member me by.”

“Well, thanks, Diddyboom.” He gave her hand a quick squeeze, let go again, and dropped the disc into a jacket pocket. “Muchas
gracias. Not that we’re about to forget you anyhow.”

The pet names blew away on the wind as though the wind were time, names from long ago when she toddled laughing to him and
hadn’t quite mastered “Uncle Anson.” They walked for another span, upon the wet strip where the sea had packed and smoothed
and darkened the sand. Water hissed from the breakers to lap near their feet.

“Please don’t thank me!” she cried suddenly.

He threw her a pale-blue glance. “Why shouldn’t I?”

Tears glimmered. “You’ve done so much for me, and I, I’ve never done anything for you. Can’t I even give you a shell?”

“Of course you can, honey, and we’ll give it a good home,” he answered. “If you think you owe Juliana
and me something, pay the debt forward; give somebody else who needs it a leg up someday.” He paused. “But you don’t owe,
not really. We’ve gotten plenty enjoyment out of our honorary status. In fact, to us, for all practical purposes, you’re family.”

“Why?” she half challenged, half appealed. “What reason for it, ever?”

“Well,” he said carefully, “I’m auld acquaintance with your parents, you know. Your mother since she was a sprat, and when
your dad-to-be married her, I was delighted at what a catch she’d made. Juliana agreed.” He ventured a grin. “I expected she’d
call him a dinkum cobber, till she reminded me Aussies these days don’t talk like that unless they’re conning a tourist.”

“But we, we’re nobody.”

“Nonsense. Your sort doesn’t take handouts, nor need them. If I gave a bit of help, it was a business proposition.”

Already in her life she knew otherwise. Helen Stambaugh’s father had been master of a fishing boat till the fisheries failed.
Guthrie put up the capital, as a silent partner, for him to start over with a charter cruiser that went up to the Strait of
Juan de Fuca and around among the islands. For a while he prospered modestly. Sigurd Ebbesen, immigrant from Norway, became
his mate, then presently his son-in-law, and then, with a further financial boost from Guthrie, a second partner captaining
a second boat. But the venture collapsed when the North American economy in general did. The old man was able to take an austere
retirement. Sigurd survived only because Guthrie persuaded various of his associates and employees that this was a pleasant
way to spend some leisure time. However, Dagny, first child of two, must act as bull cook when school was out. She graduated
to deckhand, then mate-
cum
-engineer, still unpaid, her eyes turned starward each night that was unclouded.

“No,” she protested. “Not business, not really. You, you’re just p-plain good—”

Her stammer ended. She swallowed a ragged breath, knuckled her eyes, and walked faster.

Guthrie matched the pace. He allowed her a hundred meters of quietness, except for the wind and surf and sea-mews, before
he laid a hand on her shoulder and said, “Friends are friends. I don’t gauge anybody’s worth by their bank accounts. Been
poor too damn often, myself, for that.”

She jarred to a stop. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean—”

“Sure.” A smile creased his face. “I know you that well, at least.” He sighed. “Wish it was better. If I could’ve seen you
folks more than in far-apart snatches—” It trailed away.

She mustered the calm, though fists clenched at her sides, to look straight at him and say almost levelly, “Then maybe you
could’ve steered me off this mess I’ve gotten myself into? Is that what you’re thinking, Uncans? Prob’ly you’re right.”

Again he smiled, one-sidedly. “You didn’t get into it all by yourself, muchacha. You had enthusiastic help.”

The color came and went in her cheeks. “Don’t hate him. Please don’t. He never would have if I—I hadn’t—”

Guthrie nodded. “Yeah. I understand. Also, when the word got to me, I looked into the situation a bit. Love and lust and more
than a little rebellion, right? By all accounts, Bill Thurshaw’s a decent boy. Bright, too. I figure I’ll hire an eye kept
on him, and if he shows promise—But that’s for later. Right now, you
are
too young, you two, to get married It’d be flybait for a thousand assorted miseries, till you broke up; and your kid would
suffer worst.”

Steadier by the minute, she asked him: “Then what should I do?”

“That’s what we brought you here to decide,” he reminded her.

“Dad and Mother—”

“They’re adrift with a broken rudder, poor souls. Yes, they’ll stand by you whatever you choose, whatever
the sniggering neighbors say and the dipnose government does, but what’s the least bad course? They’ve also got your brother
to think about. School alone could become an endurance contest, in the clammy piety that’s settled on this country.”

Momentarily, irrelevantly surprised, she wondered, “Piety? The Renewal doesn’t care about God.”

“I should’ve said pietism,” he growled. “Puritanism. Masochists dictating that the rest of us be likewise. Oh, sure, nowadays
the words are ‘environment’ and ‘social justice,’ but it’s the same dreary dreck, what Churchill once called equality of misery.
And Bismarck, earlier, said that God looks after fools, drunks, and the United States of America; but when the North American
Union elected the Renewal ticket, I suspect God’s patience came to an end.”

Shared need brought unspoken agreement that they walk on. The sand squelped faintly beneath their shoes; incoming tide began
to erase the tracks. “Never mind,” Guthrie said. “My mouth’s too apt to ramble. Let’s stay somewhere in the vicinity of the
point. You’re pregnant. That’s shocking enough, in the national climate today, but you’re also reluctant to do the environmentally
responsible thing and have it terminated.”

“A life,” she whispered. “It didn’t ask for this. And it, it trusts me. Is that crazy?”

“No. ‘Terminate’ means they poison that life out of you. If you wait till later, it means they crush the skull and slice off
any inconvenient limbs and haul it out of you. Yeah, there are times when that may seem necessary, and there are too many
people. But when across half the planet they’re dying by the millions of famine and sickness and government actions, I should
think we can afford a few new little lives.”

“But I—” She lifted her hands and gazed at the empty palms. “What can I do?” The fingers closed. “Whatever you say, Uncans.”

“You’re a proud one, you are,” he observed. “I’ve a hunch this whole business, including your hope you
can save the baby, is partly your claim to a fresh breath in all the stifling smarminess around you. Well, we’ve been over
and over the ground, these past several days. Juliana and I, we never wanted to lay pressure on you, one way or another. We
only want to help. But first we had to help you grope forward till you knew what your own mind was, didn’t we?”

“I could always talk to you … better than to anybody else.”

“M-m, maybe because we haven’t been around so much.”

“No, it was
you
, Uncans.” With haste: “And Auntie. All right. What should I do?”

“Have the baby. That’s pretty well decided. Juliana believes if you don’t, you’ll always be haunted. Not that your life would
be ruined, but you’d never feel completely happy. Besides the killing itself, you’d know you’d crawfished, which plain isn’t
in your nature. Trust Juliana’s insight. If I hadn’t had it to guide me dealing with people, I’d be flat broke and beachcombing.”