Harvest of Stars (63 page)

Kyra sighed. “No surprise, I guess. This was such a loco little hope.” Nevertheless its death made a heaviness within her.

“Let us and our descendants think how better we can spend our efforts toward outliving doomsday,” Rinndalir said.

He really had changed, she thought. And, heartening: She herself would have plenty to do. Fragments of unborn planets tumbled countless in the chaotic regions where their coalescence had been forbidden; often the two suns flung them inward; a meteoroid patrol was needed, still more than around Sol.

That made her say, “Our descendants? This generation will do well to carve out a bare foothold for them.”

“And to live our lives,” Rinndalir insinuated.

He hadn’t changed
too
much. At accelerations he could tolerate, the trip home would take a spell. Disappointment faded from Kyra—nobody had really expected any other outcome—as she found herself looking forward.

T
HUS FAR THE
weather service had no reliable way of predicting fogs in Hollowland. That enormous swamp country, filling a quarter of tropical Aetolia, was too little known; conditions within it were altering too fast and radically. Even a satellite could often give no more than one or two hours’ warning before hundreds of square kilometers were shrouded.

Such a cloud rose and rolled over Nero Valencia and Hugh Davis as they were bound back to camp after several days of survey—cruising about, observing, sampling, testing, charting how well the new-made wilderness fared, seeking to learn what the latest turns were that its development had taken. All at once they must creep and grope, engine down to a whisper, eyes well-nigh blinded.

Vision barely reached from end to end of the boat. Sometimes a thick tendril of mist drifted across to hide that much. Just enough light sneaked from above to shimmer off wet deck and cabin. Everywhere around, formlessness eddied gray, murk behind it. A glance overboard caught the leaves, broad and dark green around rosy flowers, between which the prow cut. Now and then a fish slipped past. The plants covered most of the brown water, whose clucking against the hull was the single sound from
outside it. Occasionally a specter appeared, a hummock fringed with rushes or a mangrove glooming over shallows, but sight quickly lost it again. Heat had given way to raw and sullen chill; odors of growth and blossom had gone rank.

“Sir,” called Hugh from the wheel, “trouble!”

“What now?” asked Valencia, crouched at the bows for whatever he might do as a lookout.

“The needle—direction finder—” The boy’s voice, which was changing, cracked. “It’s gone malo! Wobbles through … ninety degrees at least.”

Valencia scowled but kept his calm. “Not unusual. Radio interference. A’s at the peak of its sunspot cycle, you know. And stars get extra temperamental when they approach the end of their time on the main sequence.”

He rose and faced aft, to give an image of reassurance. The short, sturdy figure in the cockpit stood firm. “Can you take an average bearing?” Valencia inquired.

“I’ll try, sir. Though I wonder if we haven’t gone way off course regardless. For sure, we didn’t hit any patch of water lilies like this outbound.”

“You
are
observant,” Valencia said. “Good for you.”

Good muchacho all around, he thought, bright, hard-working, respectful without being obsequious, excellent company in the field. Bueno, consider what stock he came from. And maybe his rather hit-or-miss home life had actually helped him; maybe Kyra wasn’t careless but wise. Not many mothers would allow a boy his age to go on an expedition afar, no matter how skillful the adult companion. She had smilingly agreed it would be a learning experience that no vivifer or quivira could match.

“I think probably you’re right,” Valencia went on. “But if we keep going in this general direction, we should hit our island somewhere. Then we can follow the shoreline to camp.”

“This rotten visibility—” Hugh wasn’t complaining, Valencia knew; he was grumbling, man-fashion. “I wish we could anchor and wait the damn fog out.”

“Me too. However, at this time of year one of these
banks can hang around for twenty or thirty days. We have hardly any drinking water left, remember.” Irony: Hollowland was the single region other than sea and littoral where native life had taken hold; and here it had flourished. Dying and decaying, it poisoned the swamp for humans. Genes could be put into Terrestrial plants and animals that let them thrive, but a century might pass before the toxins were entirely gone. “People and robots around the planet have plenty to do without us hollering unnecessarily for help.”

“I understand, sir.”

Another wraith showed vaguely through the fog to starboard. It resembled the head of a medieval halberd thrust two meters above the water, encrusted blue shells tapering in spikes and hooks to a point as sharp as their own edges. “Oye, I never saw a riprock that big before!” Valencia exclaimed. “We certainly are off course.” He squinted. “Dead, yes.” The new microbes had killed the fresh-water coraloids and much else, not by attacking alien proteins but by their waste products.

The boat glided on. The shape vanished. There might be more. He’d better keep watch. Before he resumed, he saw Hugh shiver. As he hunkered down he heard, “Brrr! That thing, it’s like—like the swamp wants revenge.”

“For what?” Valencia asked.

“For us bringing in our kind of life to destroy what was here.”

Mood swings were normal at puberty, but Valencia decided to curb this one if he could. The surroundings were eerie enough as was. “Hugh,” he said, “if you want to be a ranger, you’ll have to scrap that attitude. We’re simply doing what nature herself did, over and over, on Earth—and on Demeter, I’ll bet we find when we’ve read the fossil record. For instance, when the Panamanian isthmus closed, back in the Pleistocene, the big cats moved down from North America and the big carnivorous South American birds went under. Read your paleontology, for the same reason you should read history. You can’t know the present without knowing the past.”

Quite a homily for an old gunjin, he thought. On Earth he had barely heard about geological eras, couldn’t have named them to save his cojones, and hadn’t cared to learn. The years on this world had made him into somebody else, somebody whom Kyra Davis trusted with her son. … Perhaps the change wasn’t so great. The potential must have been in that young man who now seemed a total stranger, or why had he come? An emptiness he’d scarcely been aware of, long since filled. …

Hugh’s tone lightened. “Bueno, yes. And this country, it’ll become wonderful, won’t it, sir?”

Valencia nodded. “Rich. Wetlands always have been. From these breeding grounds life should go on to colonize the rest of the continent. Oh, and don’t forget, we do mean to keep reserves where native species are protected. I even hear talk about trying for a mixed ecology in places where—”

A crash resounded. The deck jarred beneath his feet, tilted, threw him sideways. He caught the rail and slammed himself to a halt. A horrible gurgle rose from below.

Glaring aft through the fog, he saw Hugh leap out of the cockpit, onto the deck by the cabin. Impulsive, untrained, the boy left the motor running and sped toward the man, as if Valencia were his father. The boat shuddered, slewed about, and pitched. Hugh went over the side.

Valencia sprang that way. Fighter’s reflexes kept him on a footing that lurched and slanted beneath him. The hull groaned. They’d struck a riprock, he knew—close below the surface, concealed by fog and the lilies. The boat was hard on, holed, its wound worse for every second that passed.

He jumped into the cockpit and switched off the motor. The boat stopped grinding itself against the skeleton. It settled sluggishly astern till it lay canted, bow up, after-deck awash.

Valencia was already amidships, on all fours, straining out and yelling. “Hugh! Hugh!” The fog smoked thicker and colder.

The boy swam well. He should have come straight up
and trod water, waiting for a hand back aboard. He hadn’t. He’d struck his head or—

Valencia ducked into the cabin and unclipped an insulated flashtube. He kicked off his shoes, skinned out of shirt and pants, dived. The preparations had taken about thirty seconds.

As he slipped among the lily stalks the beam probed ahead through upswirled silt, dim and cloudy. The depth was just a few meters; he quickly saw mud and sodden logs. His lungs strained, his heart thuttered—Yonder! The light picked the riprock out of gloom, rising past sight, cruelly jagged, to the vessel it had pierced. The base spread wide. Hugh sprawled near the bottom, unmoving. His clothes had gotten snagged.

Air, air. But Hugh had been without air for how long? Valencia threshed his way to the boy. His head roared and whirled. He braced himself among the lumps, caught hold, tugged. Somewhere distant he felt how the sawlike edges slashed him. Blood drifted into the beam of the flashtube now held between his teeth. The knowledge that he might well die was academic. Here was a task.

He freed the body, took it in his arms, let the tube drop, and kicked. His lungs could endure no more, they emptied in a rush of bubbles.

But then his head was free, he gasped, he saw. He fought through the lilies to the counter, caught the taffrail, hauled his weight one-handed up on deck, dragged Hugh after him. Blood spread and spread out of his cuts.

Never mind. Roll the muchacho over, take him around the belly under the diaphragm, disgorge the foul tide of what he’d breathed and swallowed. Did he breathe now? No? Lay him on deck, put mouth to mouth and heel of hand at breastbone,
work
. Blood washed over the white face, on into the gray fog, the only color in all the universe.

Hugh stirred. His eyelids fluttered. Valencia sat back. His throat tightened, he barked, he realized with a shadowy startlement that he was trying to weep.

Nonsense. Jobs yet to do. He got the lax cold form below, undressed, toweled, into a bunk with plenty of blankets. “It’s muy bien,” he croaked, “everything’s going
to be muy bien, Hugh.” Lips twitched slightly upward, but the boy was scarcely conscious. He felt warmer to the touch, though.

The touch made an awful red mess. Valencia fetched the first aid kit and patched the assorted slashes on both of them. Luckily, none were serious, except that three of his required plast to stop the bleeding. The swamp water they’d taken in was another matter. Bueno, he had anti-toxin. He gave Hugh a double injection and himself a standard one. That ought to serve temporarily.

The sooner he got medical help, the better. This boat wasn’t going anywhere. Valencia wanted dreadfully to lie down and sleep. He must have lost more blood than he’d known. He hobbled to the radio, slumped into the seat, and called Port Fireball.

“Hola, hola, do you read me? … We’ve got troubles—” He explained.

“We’ll dispatch a flyer immediately,” said the voice at the other end, how crisp, how resonant and alert. “Keep transmitting on distress waveband so it can home on you. It’ll hover and lower a cable chair, if you can manage one. … You can? Excellent. In about three hours. Sorry, nothing closer is available.”

“Uh, our flyer in camp, and the gear—”

“That’ll be taken care of later. You two come first. Demeter isn’t exactly overpopulated, you know. Hasta la vista.”

For a moment silence hummed. Valencia moved to switch the audio off. A new voice, faint and rustly, said, “Hi, there.”

“What’s that?” Valencia asked. “Where are you calling from?”

“From this neighborhood,” replied the voice. “I happened to overhear you.” Urgency: “How is Hugh Davis in fact doing?”

Dimly indignant—exhaustion ached through his marrow—Valencia snapped, “If you heard me, you know.”

“Yeah. But listen, I’ve known cases like that where the patient’s heart suddenly quit. It’s not likely here, he’s a
strong kid, but you wouldn’t take chances with Kyra’s son, would you? Don’t sleep. Torture yourself and stand by with the cardioshocker till the rescue team gets there.”

“Who the devil are you, anyway?”

“Anson Guthrie.”

Valencia gaped into the dusk that brimmed the cabin. “Huh?”

“Are you so beat you’ve forgotten, and you a ranger? Solar-energized transceivers are bred into a certain percentage of plants, these days, and relay stations are spotted around.”

“Oh, yes, but—”

“Then you may recall that every once in a while I get into the bionet. Happens I was in tune with a tree nearby when I heard you.”

Guthrie could have been anywhere, Valencia thought, seashore or sea bottom, mountain or valley, prairie or forest, a point of consciousness flitting through an immense and growing life-world. … “I see. Gracias for the reminder, sir. Of course I’ll watch over him. Kyra’s son.”

“Not only hers, I’d say. You’re earning a share.”

Guthrie spoke on, words of encouragement, reminiscences, arguments, crotchets, bawdy jokes, whatever would hold Valencia awake. Eventually the flyer arrived.

In the hospital at Port Fireball the staff examined and treated Hugh and discharged him in short order. Valencia they kept till late the next day while they cloned new blood for him and repaired other damage. His home was just four klicks away, but since he was still weak, when they were done they sent him there in a car.