Harvest of Stars (22 page)

Nerves drawing taut, she approached Esther Blum’s dwelling. The Regent of all the Homesteaders might be a friend of Guthrie’s from way back, but a hundred things occupied her hours and Kyra could scarcely use the jefe’s
name to gain admission. Worse, this place was probably under surveillance. Who was in the unmarked car that drove slowly past, who was it who stood on the corner as if expectant?

She passed between rosebeds to stairs, mounted them to verandah coolness, and touched the call plate. The door opened. “Saludos,” said a muscular young man. His eyes appreciated her. “What can I do for you?”

“I, I need to see Sra. Blum,” Kyra answered.

“Plenty of folks do. I can maybe swing an appointment for you day after tomorrow.”

“Now. Por favor. It’s personal and urgent. Won’t you tell her it concerns Winston P. Sanders and the drunken mermaid?”

“Huh?”

“Por favor.” Kyra gave him the three-kilowatt smile while shrugging to induce maximum movement of the upper works. “I know it sounds funny, but I promise you she’ll receive me. If she doesn’t, boot me out.”

“M-m, it’s weird enough that she should at least enjoy hearing it. Come in, Señorita, uh—”

“Bovary. Emma Bovary.”

In a chamber that served as an anteroom, a variety of men and women waited to be called. Two looked like farmers and two like tech bosses, but who were the afro in the dashiki and the shavepate in the red robe? A multiceiver was lacking. Printouts of books and periodicals lay on end tables. Kyra tried to read an article about discoveries under the surface of Mars. It wouldn’t take hold of her. Interesting stuff, but humans weren’t exploring those caves, machines were. The author emphasized their intelligence. Was the author a machine too, the byline a heteronym? Could well be. If not, the generally prosy text and occasional vivid random-generated phrase showed that he or she had merely ridden herd on a writing program.

“Señorita Bovary, por favor.”

Kyra’s heart leaped like her body. A woman led her down a hall and showed her through a hinged door.

Clutter made the office beyond seem less spacious than
it was, a jackdaw’s nest of objects crammed on shelves and tables, codices, replicated ancient Egyptian figurines, a kachina doll, assorted paperknives, the mounted fossil of a fish, German beer steins, miscellaneous trophies, a teddy bear that clearly had no mechanisms but was stuffed. … Esther Blum sat behind an enormous desk. She was small, thin, quick-moving, in a yellow blouse and purple slacks. Stiff white hair framed a face deeply furrowed but aflicker with expression and pale blue eyes that had watched almost a century go by.

“Hi,” she piped when the door had shut. “What’s your real name? If I were stealing from forgotten classics, I’d pick something less glum, like Roberta Wickham. Speak up.”

Kyra drew breath. “Are we secure?”

“From the dipnoses of our beloved government, you mean? Yes. It’s quite a spell since I had this house screened forty ways from Sunday. The Renewal had gone onto the rubbish heap, but I didn’t imagine the country would stay free forever, if you call that pittance of liberty we got back freedom: Since then I’ve had the safeguards updated as necessary. Certain persons in a position to know inform me, on the QT, what is about to become necessary. Satisfied? Sit down and introduce yourself.”

Kyra obeyed. “It’s about Anson Guthrie,” she added.

“I knew that the moment I heard your password.”

“He gave it to me. Wouldn’t explain what it means.”

Blum leered. “Nor will I, my dear. That incident would shock your socks off.”

“Uh, señora—”

“Nothing doing. It was long ago and I was young and to this day I have no remorse, but it’s best that only Anse and I are left to chuckle.” Blum’s grin vanished. “Okay, what’s the tsuris?”

“Pardon me?”

“The trouble. Grim, no?”

“Yes.” Kyra told her.

Wrinkled lips shaped a soundless whistle. “Oy gevalt!” The eyes narrowed, the gaunt head nodded. “It figures,
though. I had to work at believing that was Anse on the multi. But what would they gain by faking him? Could those claims about saboteurs fixing to blow things to bits be real? Now—We’d better move quick, before that mamzer they made nails things at Fireball down too tight for Anse to open again.”

“He’s hoping you—”

Blum lifted a hand. “Hush. Let me think.” She turned to stare out the window at a tree and the sky. In the back of her brain Kyra wondered which of several methods had been used to make the panes proof against voice vibrations that an instrument outside could decode. Blum had seen no need to draw the blind. Of course not; that would have marked this interview as special. … Kyra’s pulse ticked minutes away.

Blum stirred, blinked, reached into a box on her desk and took forth a cheroot. “Do you indulge, missy?” she asked. “No? Sensible. Keeps the biorepair bills down.” A gaudy ring on her finger spouted fire to light it. Her tone bleakened. “I’m afraid we can’t offer much help.”

Kyra had rallied herself. “What can you do?”

Blum gave her an approving look. “Straight to the point. Excellent. To start with, I can just allow you a dab of time, or watchers will speculate.” She sighed. “Yes, the Sepo have us staked out. Not conspicuously, but in a community like this, things get noticed, and I’ve pals in the local police department. Nor heavily, but enough that we’d be crazy to contact Anse here, and he’d be crazy to linger.

“Nevertheless, I do want to meet with him, and I think I can arrange something useful through trustworthy intermediaries. We’ll rendezvous in Portland tomorrow.”

“What?” Kyra exclaimed. “Isn’t that station a trap by now?”

“Quite possibly, but not to worry. You buy a ticket for Portland, all right, but get off at a certain hamlet about halfway to there. Have a cup of coffee in the one and only cafe. It’s got to be the planet’s second worst coffee, but every good cause requires sacrifices. A man will join you. I’m not sure who he’ll be, but if he isn’t Henry Willard
he’ll still give you that name so you’ll know. The busies aren’t going to trail an ordinary farmer who drives off on some or other errand. Don’t tell Henry anything. I won’t have either. Why jeopardize him as well as ourselves?”

Kyra reflected transiently on trust and loyalty among folk who were close-knit. Like Fireball’s. “I understand.”

“He’ll take you to Portland and drop you off at a house where the family won’t ask questions and you can get some sleep and decent food. They aren’t Homesteaders, by the way. I have my tentacles in assorted places. Survival demands it.”

“What are they? I may need to know.”

“Nu, be forewarned and don’t ask for a drink. They’re Mormons, if that rings a bell in you. The Avantists are particularly hard on their church. The claim is that its premises are antiscientific, but the truth is that its congregations object loudly to the molding of posthuman man.

“Okay, Henry will’ve given you a screened box to have Anse in, which’ll look like a parcel from a department store. The screening will get you arrested if it blocks a detector aimed your way, but you’ll take a route from the house tomorrow evening that’ll bypass the likely check-points. The screening’s just in case you chance within a block or two of a detector. You’re going to Emprises Unlimited, which is the quivira in Portland. Got plenty of cash?”

Kyra swallowed startlement. “Uh, yes.”

“Have more.” The cheroot wagged in Blum’s mouth while she rummaged in a drawer. “You’ll enter Emprises at about 1930 hours. That’s when it generally has its biggest inflow, not that such are beswarmed, considering what they charge. Tell ’em you’re Roberta Wickham—no sense in leaving the same trail—and you’ve got a date with two others who should arrive shortly. You ever been in a quivira?”

“Yes, twice.”

“Good. You know the drill, then, sort of. If somebody wonders about your parcel, explain this is a celebration and you want to give one of your friends a present before the three of you settle down in a fancy mirage. You won’t
be hassled, seeing what kind of money you’ll be forking over. Here.” Blum handed over a sheaf of bills.

Kyra took it mechanically. “Why a quivira?”

“Because I may well be shadowed, and that is the one place safe for us to meet.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. To this day, every single room in a first-class quivira is screened as tightly as my house, and the law compels no employee to reveal, ever, what goes on. The management has ways of knowing if he did, and it’d cost him his job and get him barred from every such place. Which for his kind, or hers, would be like death or worse. They get free time on the machine, and usually grow dependent. As for the secrecy, various bigwigs patronize those establishments. Imagine the leverage an opponent would have on you if he found out what fantasies you indulge.”

Blum went briskly into details before dismissing her visitor. Kyra listened and responded, but not with her whole self. Almost against her will, a part of her was harking back.

H
ER FIRST TIME
she had gone alone, telling nobody. It wasn’t anything to be ashamed of, she kept assuring herself. An experience, an adventure. Lots of people went, and those who had described it to her seemed none the worse. She had graduated from the Academy, she’d be shipping out, this was her last chance for Heisenberg knew how long. Still, it took resolution as well as a large piece of her savings. She was angry to feel her face hot, and that made her blush all the deeper.

The counselor who received her was skillfully simpática. “We simply go a step beyond vivifer capability on a multi,” she explained. “I grant you, it
is
a threshold. You’re wise in wanting to cross it cautiously. Let me
suggest you spend one objective hour in a standard program. That way, at first you can relax, let things happen, and enjoy. As you grow confident, you can start taking an interactive part. If you don’t try for something too different from what’s in the program, it will adapt as smoothly to your wishes as the real world does when everything’s going right for you. … Is that agreeable? … Now let’s discuss what kind of virtuality you’d like. Take your time. Don’t be afraid to speak frankly. I’m shockproof, and nothing goes beyond these walls.”

Presently she led Kyra to a single-person room, helped her disrobe, fitted the helmet and other connections to her, guided her into the bath. For an indefinite time Kyra lay blind and deaf. She felt an odd shiftiness in her perceptions, realized that the system was adjusting the fluid to her precise specific gravity and skin temperature, began to slip down the pleasant slope that leads into sleep, except this was the machine gently pulsing her brain. …

She floated in space. Stars gleamed everywhere around. Great plumes of zodiacal light spread from a shrunken sun whose glare did her eyes no harm; and though she wore nothing but halter, skirt, and sandals, she was at Zen ease, utterly alert, every sense a-thrill. Turning, she saw Mars before her, a huge ruddiness crowned with white polar caps, veined with canals, dappled with oases and dead sea bottoms. She stretched her arms forward and plunged toward it.

On the surface she was entirely material, breathing the thin air, savoring the aromas of desert shrubs borne on a cool wind, moving lightly under the low weight. The sun stood at mid-afternoon; she had till midnight, subjective time. Cinderella.

Her choice had been innocent—juvenile, probably. John Carter rode from the west and greeted her with a Virginia courtesy that centuries had not blurred. He led a thoat for her. Over the sands they fared, he pointing out venerable ruins and fleeting beasts. At a camp of green men Tars Tarkas poured wine for them, after which they boarded a flying ship. Above a canal the towers of Helium
flashed athwart sunset. Dejah Thoris wasn’t home when they landed, but red warriors made Kyra welcome with feline dignity, each more handsome than the last though none equal to John. By then she had gotten over her shyness and begun making requests to see this or do that. He obliged—not passively, but as a gentleman would who knew the country and had ideas of his own. Together they roamed the magical streets while Phobos and Deimos hurtled aloft, bigger than Luna above Earth, to fill the world full of silver and hastening shadows. When at length she must return, he read her body language and took her in his arms. She’d never been kissed before with such authority. Damn, she thought as she went astral and flashed toward the blue star that was Earth, next time she’d proposition him earlier.

There was no next time. For a while it tempted powerfully, but she had too much else to occupy her, and that was
real
Her memories of Barsoom did not fade in the way of a dream. As far as her brain was concerned, those traces were no different from any left by actual events. But they took their proper place among adolescent crushes and toys beloved in childhood.

Her second trip to a quivira she made with Ivar Stranding, during the single brief span they managed to have on Earth together. He wanted it more than she did. Not that he was addicted, but he’d taken all his few opportunities to go. Thus he knew a fair amount about the interactive potentialities. It was more than a game, he insisted. For a couple it could be a kind of spiritual union. She hesitated. What about inner privacy? She didn’t ask him that. Their relationship was strained already. Plain to see, he thought this might help. Eventually she agreed.

A free-form program demanded the full resources of the system, especially when two persons were cross-connected. It cost. Bueno, whatever a spacer might lack, money wasn’t included. He told her to let him take the initiative till she got the feel of things. “Then we’ll both be gods, darling.”

They stood at a parapet overlooking the unborn cosmos.

Their own radiance illuminated the vast walls and spires of their stronghold. Against its ramparts, beneath primordial night, formlessness blazed and raged. Waves, a million light-years from trough to crest, surged in to burst with a roar and a song of energies. Spindrift stars, flung high, exploded as supernovae, a dreadful glory strewing the stuff of worlds to be across emptiness.