Harvest of Stars (30 page)

Packer shook his head. “Swimming in, though,” he muttered.

“How else?” Kyra demanded. “I know that little beach. Oh, I know it well! Favorite resting place when we’ve been romping with the Keiki, right? Nothing there but a chain link fence, mainly so casuals like me won’t stray inshore
and get underfoot. The Sepo haven’t electrified it or anything, have they?”

“N-no. Too much else for them to do, I guess. It’s only been a short while since this mess exploded.” Packer gusted a sigh. “Feels like forever.”

“We’re betting that the Sepo are no closer to a hundred percent efficient than we are,” Valencia pursued. “If I were their comandante, I’d concentrate my force—not infinite, is it?—where things might be expected to happen. Along the sea I’d just have two or three men walk sentry. And not my highly trained corpsmen. Militia. Am I right?”

“Y-yes.”

“We should be able to slip by them. I’m in that business. Before meeting you today I bought tools.” Valencia grinned. “As the jefe says, the wildness of this stunt helps its chances.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. The Keiki—”

“They’re my friends,” Kyra said. “To them this will be a game, another of those odd games humans play.”

“Could be.”

“I like it, Wash,” Guthrie said.

Packer straightened in his chair. “Then it’s go, and I should stop squandering time,” he answered quietly.

Talk went on. When Packer left, it was not because the subject was exhausted but because he would be unwise to lengthen his absence.

At the door he shook hands with Valencia and Kyra, while his gaze stayed with Guthrie. “You’re brave people, you three,” he said.

“You’re risking more than we are, Wash,” Guthrie replied.

“In a way. Let’s hope it’ll prove worth it. Adiós.” Packer left them.

“Okay,” Guthrie clipped, “let’s review our program for the next stage in the light of what he’s told us, and set it in train. He can’t fend off the Sepo for long without corroboration.”

Presently: “Nero, I gather hacking is among your skills. Take the terminal. I’ll give directions.”

Kyra had nothing further to do but sit back and admire.

Although she necessarily knew a considerable amount about computer systems, her work had never called for their subversion. On the contrary! That sort of prank could spell disaster for a spacecraft, or a civilization, dependent on them. She recalled an Academy course in the safeguards against it and how those had evolved and elaborated through time. By now, an outsider could break into a properly secured program about as readily and inconspicuously as he could break into a bank vault. However, if an insider went about it right, he could insert certain vulnerabilities, virtually unnoticeable. Then if an outsider, maybe years or decades later, knew what had been done, he would be able to slip commands of his own along the communication lines into the system, and it would heed them just as if these were what it was supposed to do.

Of course, this took art and subtlety. Even as simple an operation as entering a false message and making it seem to have come from a real source was a nine-ball juggling act.

How deftly Valencia stroked the keys. His head might have been a young Hermes’—no, a Pan’s, or a Lucifer’s—leaning intent above a mischief from which would be born music.

Not that Guthrie wasn’t impressive. When he, speaking as if from Quito, added his personal brief message to the coded command, it was a masterpiece. The spaceship would lift tonight. Until then, not a ghost of a hint about it to anyone. The terrorists did not imagine this awkward craft would carry a vital mission. Should they do so, their reaction might well be massively violent.

Nevertheless, Guthrie was a program in a machine. Nero was a man.

“I suppose the Sepo comandante will wonder a lot about this,” Guthrie said. “However, we can assume it won’t nag him into taking any initiative contrary to the orders until too late. They wouldn’t assign their smartest boy to as unlikely a trouble spot as this.” He looked back at Valencia. “Now we have to alert Tamura in L-5 and Rinndalir on Luna.”

That went as a routine pair of memos, sent over the phone—untraceably, courtesy of the worm—to the appropriate beamcaster. Nothing but the sender’s name, a drab “A. A. Craig,” revealed that another communication was encrypted within each. The format had capacity for no more than a few words. Guthrie was trusting his existence to Tamura’s intelligence and resolution. He was trusting Kyra’s to Rinndalir’s intelligence and goodwill. The last of those was an unknown quantity. Anxiety twisted anew within her.

“Bastante,” Guthrie said. “We can relax now till time to boost.”

Valencia rose from his chair, writhing to loosen cramped muscles. The sight roused Kyra. She put her qualms aside, got up likewise, and glided toward him. Her smile broadened as she neared. They’d have to brazen this out. “Jefe,” she began, “would you mind very much—”

“We should try for a nap before we grab another meal and start off,” Valencia interrupted. “It will be a fairish drive and a busy night.” His glance met hers. He grinned wryly. “A nap,” he repeated.

“He’s right, you know,” Guthrie said.

Kyra halted. “I suppose he is,” she mumbled.

Maybe she could manage it, stretched on the bed beside him.

T
HE ROAD WAS
narrow, a slash through forest, snaking steeply down toward the shore. It ended at a small parking lot. Valencia drove to the corner where shadow was thickest, doused headlights and cut engine. Darkness and silence thundered upon Kyra. She got out. Guthrie felt heavy in her hands. Valencia joined her. For a moment they stood mute.

Her eyes adapted. In starlight and sky-glow, the scene emerged for her. Along the pavement, ginger mingled with
hibiscus; the mild air was honeyed with its odor. Behind, she recognized the brushlike blooms of a silk oak, the spreading height of a koa, then the woods became one black mass that climbed away mountainward. On the other side, through the heavy mesh of the fence, she saw grass hueless over a slope that plunged to the sea. Surf hemmed a wall of shoreline with unrestful white. She heard its noise as a seething amidst a deeper, softer pulse from the waters a-glimmer beyond.

“Looks like we’ve got the place to ourselves,” Guthrie said. “I wasn’t sure we would. The occupation force in the port, yah, that’d discourage people from coming near it, but it’s a ways off and this is a favorite spot for lovers.”

Unthinkingly, Kyra nodded and smiled. She remembered.

“It has been for a long time, I imagine,” Valencia remarked.

Guthrie had related the history to him when he inquired: “After the Renewal fell, we decided Fireball could use an American base, and Hawaii seemed best. It’d cost more to demolish the old, abandoned facilities and rebuild than to start from scratch. The economy was in such desperate shape, and ‘ecology’ wasn’t the knee-jerk shibboleth it had been, that the new government was glad to sell us a little piece of Volcanoes Park. Especially since we undertook to restore and replant as needed, everywhere in the park. The Goddess Temple had let it go to hell. Controlling things like blight and animal populations was a religious no-no. We did build on the shore, out of lava reach, but we also contributed to general maintenance on a permanent basis. The arrangement’s worked fine.

“Then, about thirty years ago, the Chinese terminated their intelligence-genetics project. You probably aren’t aware, at this late date, what a mistake it had been. They didn’t learn anything about the role of DNA in brain processes that hadn’t been learned in easier ways, without creating hapless metamorphs. And now the Federation had legislated that neosophs have the same rights as human beings. What to do with these? I thought Fireball
could provide them a home. Among other advantages, we could block off the gaping tourists, yawping ideologists, and quick-money hustlers. It took propaganda, political pressure, dickering, bribery, and a spot of blackmail, but I got the franchise. They have a secluded bit of coast to themselves. A patrol boat keeps unwanted visitors well off shore. They live as they see fit and are developing a culture of their own. No human I’ve talked to claims to really understand it.”

“Bueno,” Valencia continued, “I’m happy we don’t have to sneak through the jungle, but I won’t open the fence where any passerby might notice.” He hefted his tool bag and disappeared soundlessly into the growth. After a minute, spots of light from his flash and the hum of his power cutter passed among the leaves to Kyra.

They thrilled through her. The fleeing was at an end, the foray begun! It felt like hurtling forward on a surfboard, but this wave roared as high as the stars. A mosquito in her mind shrilled that failure would be nauseating, quite probably fatal. She didn’t listen. The tide ran too strong.

Guthrie’s lenses glinted upward at her. “I think you look forward to the next several hours,” he said.

Kyra nodded. “I confess I do. And you?”

“In my fashion. Which you’d find pretty cold and abstract, maybe sort of the way you’d approach an interesting problem in mathematics.”

Of course. He was bodiless. And yet he seemed capable of concern, anger, merriment, regret, affection. Was it all an act? Or could such feelings dwell in the awareness itself? She thought so. If not, why had Guthrie bothered to survive, let alone strive and fight? Kyra recalled old married couples she had known. Sex for them had dwindled to ember or ash, she supposed; nonetheless she had seen that she was in the presence of love.

“I envy you,” he said low.

Astonished, she almost dropped him. Valencia saved them from further talk by reappearing. “Come,” he said. Kyra put Guthrie into the carryall, it onto her shoulders, and followed. Valencia’s flash lit their way through the
tangle and she moved easily, parting it before her, letting it slip smoothly back behind her. “I see you’ve done this before,” he remarked.

“Yes, I like wilderness. You?”

“Likewise. If you can call those managed snippets wilderness. Here we are.”

He had parted the links and pulled them back just enough for a person to squeeze past. The ground beyond, though open, was trickier going, irregularly canted, strewn with boulders and potholes that the long grass hid. Peering, sweating, swearing, Kyra picked her way to the footpath that led from the locked gate. Valencia moved with his usual panther ease. Damn him.

They reached the sea and its children.

Fireball had enlarged a cove, using the rock blasted out to make a breakwater at its mouth. Sheer bluffs flanked a beach of black sand. On a nearly level plot above it, a hemicylindrical shed protected the dwellers’ meager belongings. With magnetic latches, its doors opened to a push; jaws grasping knobs could pull them shut. A motor raft and a powerboat lay at a pier for human convenience. No other artifacts were visible. It was too dark to see the art that the Keiki Moana had splashed in paint along the bottoms of the bluffs or gnawed out of soft wood.

They slept, stretched on the sand and the turf. Kyra saw perhaps two score of them, long, sleek adults and stubby pups. What light there was sheened faint on the fur of their backs; otherwise they were sable hulks. The rest, she supposed, were at sea, hunting, exploring, whatever they did, maybe some of them on a reef coughing their strange songs at the sky. As she drew nigh these she caught the odor that drifted about them, of fish and kelp and depth and, like a memory, sun-blink on waves.

She stopped, Valencia beside her.
“Aloha, makamaka,”
she called, no louder than the surge against the breakwater. “
Aloha ahiahi. O Kyra Davis ko’u inoa.”

They stirred. Heads lifted. Eyes filled with starlight.

“I didn’t know you spoke Hawaiian,” Valencia murmured.

“I don’t, really,” Kyra answered. “Nor do they much, I
think. But it’s … customary to begin and end in that language … with them. I don’t know why.” So much had come to be, no doubt often so subtly that no one could say how. Two races, the inmost heart of each a mystery to the other—though Earth had borne them both. What then would it be like, seeking to understand beings under a different sun?

If any existed, anywhere in the universe. If neosophonts and machines were not the only companions humanity could ever have. Abruptly the stars felt cold. Kyra welcomed the approach of the Keiki.

They hitched themselves along more readily than you might have awaited. A few barked a time or two, otherwise she heard just flippers a-slap and bellies a-slither. When the foremost reached her, they all stopped wherever they chanced to be, heads up, odorous breath soughing in and out of lungs.

Kyra recognized Charlie. So she and her friends called him, again for no reason clear to her. He was bigger than average. Reared aloft, his face came even with her breasts, and the bulk curving away beneath was at least equal to Valencia’s. She could see the scar of an accident, a seam down the domed forehead and across the sea-cleaving snout. A human surgeon had stitched the wound, but cosmetic histotropy afterward had appeared impractical in his case. Besides, Charlie wasn’t vain. Was he?

His voice boomed and sibilated at her.
“A’oha, Ky’a. Hiaow kong fsh-sh s’s’hwi-oong?”

She had read that the modified vocal organs could handle Mandarin a little better than that. It was plausible, seeing as how these beings were the result of Chinese experiments. Maybe they could handle Polynesian no more awkwardly, but even in this new home of theirs they had scant occasion to practice it. What mattered tonight was that the modified brains could cope well with English. Her share had been to learn her own language as it sounded from throats like his.

“Gracias, Charlie and everyone,” she said. “Meet my amigo Nero Valencia.” She repeated the name twice, slowly. The gunjin bowed in the manner she had told him
he should, bringing his head down to Charlie’s till the stiff whiskers brushed his nose. “We are sorry to disturb your sleep.”

“[This pleasure is better than dreams. Do you want to swim? The Moon will rise in a while.]”

“Yes, we are here to swim, but right away, before the Moon comes. Forgive us that we bring no music or food and that we shan’t dance in the water with you. Later, yes, but tonight we have great need and no time.”