Harvest of Stars by Poul Anderson Page A

indeed, Kyra agreed. Most had had their existence automated into meaninglessness. Before they were born, usually.
    “Oh, I wouldn’t trade my life for anything,” she admitted. Thought ran on: The wild luck was hers and her colleagues’. They could steer ships because those ships were ninety-nine percent robotic. It wouldn’t take much development to make that a hundred percent and retire every human spacer. From a purely economic standpoint, no doubt it should already have happened. But Guthrie vetoed it. He must have done so. Nobody else had that power in the confidential councils of Fireball.
    Why did he? Romanticism, clinging to the triumphs of the past? A feudal ideal of the obligations of a master to his underlings? Maybe. She suspected that wasn’t all. He hadn’t lasted till now without being a shrewd realist. Living creatures like her could serve him better when the chips were down than any machines.
    No sense losing herself in ponderings grown trite during her voyages alone. Let her pursue this conversation. Incredibly, here she was in a threesome that included the jefe máximo. “But I do envy you a bit, the variety of folk you’ve met,” she confided to Lee. “In space, everybody’s High World.”
    He smiled. “Necessarily.”
    “That doesn’t mean we don’t get plenty of rambunctious originals out there,” Guthrie said.
    “Yes, I know,” Lee replied. “Quite apart from theLunarians, spacers are bound to think for themselves.”
    Kyra laughed again. “Often we haven’t anything else to do.”
    Lee studied her a moment before venturing diffidently, “What are your special interests, may I ask?”
    “I’d be interested to hear, myself,” Guthrie said. “If we’re in the soup together, we may as well get acquainted.”
    Kyra’s cheeks heated. While not self-effacing, she had seldom received this kind of close attention. “Assorted sports,” she related with a shrug. “Music. I play the sonor and an archaic wind instrument called the recorder, and I sing—mostly ancient ballads—not very tunefully. I read a lot, as you’d expect, and scribble a bit.”
    That seemed to catch at Lee. “Really? You write? What?”
    “Nothing special,” Kyra mumbled. “Not for presentation. Doggerel, mainly. Archaic also, sonnets, sestinas, that sort of thing.”
    Eiko Tamura said they were good. But Eiko was too kindly. Her own work, even rendered into English and thus mutilated, haiku, prose sketches—yes, and the drawings, the calligraphy—sent currents through Kyra’s spine and out to her nerve-ends. The two of them got together every time she was in L-5. Communications laser-borne between them were apt to print out several pages long.
    Kyra tossed her head. “Ay de mi,” she exclaimed as cheerily as she was able, “I’m beginning to sound like one of the jefe’s despised intellectuals. Actually, as for a significant activity, I give my computer a mean game of ortho or heisenberg, and my friends an expensive game of poker.”
    Apparently Lee welcomed lightness. “Poker? The card game? Why, I play that. We, a few others and I, have a little club that meets monthly on the net.”
    “It’s more fun in the flesh,” Kyra told him. “Then
we
deal, by turns, not the computer.” And they were together, breathing the same air, drinking the same beer, swapping the same shopworn joke phrases.
    Lee sighed. “I know, but such an opportunity is rare.”
    Was she, on a long mission with nothing for company but her ship’s half-intelligence and the occasional time-laggedmessage, ever as lonely as he perhaps was always? “Let’s organize a party, once this hooraw is over,” she suggested.
    “Put me in a robot, and I’d like to sit in,” Guthrie said. “I remember some epic games when I was human.”
    When he was human. What pain prowled under those four words?
    Maybe none. He had freely chosen to be what he was. He could undo his being whenever he wanted.
    Or could he?
    His voice reached